Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane

Authorship Place Time and Culture 1st Edition

John E. Miller pdf download
https://ebookgate.com/product/laura-ingalls-wilder-and-rose-wilder-lane-authorship-place-time-and-
culture-1st-edition-john-e-miller/

★★★★★ 4.7/5.0 (26 reviews) ✓ 217 downloads ■ TOP RATED

"Fantastic PDF quality, very satisfied with download!" - Emma W.

DOWNLOAD EBOOK
 Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane Authorship Place
Time and Culture 1st Edition John E. Miller pdf download

TEXTBOOK EBOOK EBOOK GATE

Available Formats

■ PDF eBook Study Guide TextBook

EXCLUSIVE 2025 EDUCATIONAL COLLECTION - LIMITED TIME

INSTANT DOWNLOAD VIEW LIBRARY

Instant digital products (PDF, ePub, MOBI) available
Download now and explore formats that suit you...

Laura Ingalls Wilder 1st Edition Amy Sickels

https://ebookgate.com/product/laura-ingalls-wilder-1st-edition-amy-
sickels/

ebookgate.com

Little House on the Prairie Dominoes 3 2nd Edition Laura

Ingalls Wilder

https://ebookgate.com/product/little-house-on-the-prairie-
dominoes-3-2nd-edition-laura-ingalls-wilder/

ebookgate.com

Reading with Laura Ingalls Wilder Author Study Gr 4 7 1st

Edition Eleanor Stadnyk

https://ebookgate.com/product/reading-with-laura-ingalls-wilder-
author-study-gr-4-7-1st-edition-eleanor-stadnyk/

ebookgate.com

Alec Wilder 1st Edition Edition Philip Lambert

https://ebookgate.com/product/alec-wilder-1st-edition-edition-philip-
lambert/

ebookgate.com
Big Girls Do It Stronger 1st Edition Jasinda Wilder

https://ebookgate.com/product/big-girls-do-it-stronger-1st-edition-
jasinda-wilder/

ebookgate.com

The Haunting of Brynn Wilder 1st Edition Wendy Webb

https://ebookgate.com/product/the-haunting-of-brynn-wilder-1st-
edition-wendy-webb/

ebookgate.com

Badd Business The Badd Brothers Book 10 1st Edition

Jasinda Wilder

https://ebookgate.com/product/badd-business-the-badd-brothers-
book-10-1st-edition-jasinda-wilder/

ebookgate.com

Goode to Be Bad Goode Girls Book 3 1st Edition Jasinda

Wilder

https://ebookgate.com/product/goode-to-be-bad-goode-girls-book-3-1st-
edition-jasinda-wilder/

ebookgate.com

Big Badd Wolf The Badd Brothers Book 7 1st Edition Jasinda
Wilder

https://ebookgate.com/product/big-badd-wolf-the-badd-brothers-
book-7-1st-edition-jasinda-wilder/

ebookgate.com
 Laura Ingalls Wilder
and Rose Wilder Lane
 Laura Ingalls Wilder
and Rose Wilder Lane

Authorship, Place, Time, and Culture

John E. Miller

University of Missouri Press

Columbia
Copyright © 2008 by
The Curators of the University of Missouri
University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri 65211
Printed and bound in the United States of America
All rights reserved
First paperback printing, 2016

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Miller, John E., 1945 –
Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane : authorship, place, time, and
culture / John E. Miller.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Summary: “One of America’s leading authorities on Laura Ingalls Wilder
and Rose Wilder Lane combines analyses of both women to explore their
collaborative process and how their books reflect the authors’ view of place,
time, and culture, expanding the critical discussion of Wilder and Lane
beyond the Little House”—Provided by publisher.
ISBN 978-0-8262-2076-9
ISBN 978-0-8262-2076-9 (alk.
(alk. paper)
paper)
1. Wilder, Laura Ingalls, 1867–1957— Criticism and interpretation.
2. Lane, Rose Wilder, 1886 –1968 — Criticism and interpretation.
3. Authorship— Collaboration. 4. Wilder, Laura Ingalls, 1867–1957.
Little house on the prairie. 5. Historical fiction, American—History
and criticism. 6. Autobiographical fiction, American—History and
criticism. 7. Frontier and pioneer life in literature. 8. Frontier and
pioneer life —United States. I. Title.
PS3545.I342Z7695 2008
813.52—dc22
2008028185

ø™ This paper meets the requirements of the American National Standard

for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48, 1984.

Designer: Jennifer Cropp

Typefaces: Palatino and Garamond

Jacket photo of Rose Wilder Lane courtesy of Laura Ingalls Wilder

Home Association, Mansfield, Missouri.

Jacket photo of Laura Ingalls Wilder courtesy of Laura Ingalls Wilder

Memorial Society, De Smet, South Dakota.

Jacket background art © Zsolt Biczó / Dreamstime.com

To Paul W. Glad, whose dedication to the historical craft
and whose wise and generous counsel have served as a model
and inspiration for me and countless other students.
 Contents

Acknowledgments ix

1. Writing the Self: Approaching the Biographies

of Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane 1

I. Authorship: Who Wrote the Books? 19

2. The Mother-Daughter Collaboration That

Produced the Little House Series 23

II. Place: What Attracted Wilder and

Lane to Little Houses? 43

3. The Place of “Little Houses” in the Lives

and Imaginations of Laura Ingalls Wilder
and Rose Wilder Lane 47

III. Time: What Does History Teach? 71

4. A Perspective from 1932, the Year Wilder

Published Her First Little House Book 75
 viii Contents

5. Laura Ingalls Wilder, Frederick Jackson

Turner, and the Enduring Myth of the Frontier 94

6. Rose Wilder Lane and Thomas Hart Benton:

A Turn toward History during the 1930s 110

IV. Culture: How Should People Live,

and How Should Society Function? 137

7. Wilder’s Apprenticeship as a Farm Journalist 141

8. “They Should Know When They’re Licked”:

American Indians in Wilder’s Fiction 159

9. Frontier Nostalgia and Conservative Ideology

in the Writings of Wilder and Lane 180

Notes 211
Bibliography 233
Index 255
 Acknowledgments

A book like this cannot be written without the kind assistance

and support of many people. I would like to thank generous and
unstinting archivists and librarians at the Herbert Hoover Presi-
dential Library, South Dakota State University, the University of
Wisconsin, the University of Missouri, the National Archives, the
State Historical Society of Missouri, the South Dakota State Histor-
ical Society, and the State Historical Society of Wisconsin. Special
thanks also to the staff at the Laura Ingalls Wilder Memorial Soci-
ety in De Smet, South Dakota, and at the Laura Ingalls Wilder
Home and Museum in Mansfield, Missouri. I also wish to thank the
Little House Heritage Trust for its assistance and encouragement in
making available the Rose Wilder Lane papers at the Hoover Pres-
idential Library.
I am grateful for the penetrating comments and advice of Gary
Kass, for the careful editorial assistance of Jane Lago and Julianna
Schroeder, and for the helpful suggestions made by three anony-
mous readers at the University of Missouri Press. They have made
this book immeasurably better than it was in the beginning. I am
particularly grateful to Bill Anderson and Dwight Miller, who were
generous and astute in answering my questions and helping me
think through my ideas about Wilder and Lane. To every other per-
son and organization providing assistance to me, I extend my heart-
felt gratitude.
For permission to revise and expand essays that became chapters

ix
 x Acknowledgments

4, 6, 7, and 8 of the book, I thank the following publications in which

they originally appeared:
“Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Perspective from 1932, the Year of Publi-
cation of Her First ‘Little House’ Book,” Big Muddy: A Journal of the
Mississippi River Valley 2, no. 1 (2002): 38 – 54.
“Rose Wilder Lane and Thomas Hart Benton: A Turn toward His-
tory during the 1930s,” American Studies 37, no. 2 (fall 1996): 83–101.
“Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Apprenticeship as a Farm Author,” Papers
of the Twenty-sixth Annual Dakota History Conference, ed. Arthur R.
Huseboe and Harry F. Thompson, 481–88. Sioux Falls, S.D.: Center
for Western Studies, 1994.
“American Indians in the Fiction of Laura Ingalls Wilder,” South
Dakota History 30, no. 3 (fall 2000): 303–20.
 Laura Ingalls Wilder
and Rose Wilder Lane
 1

Writing the Self

Approaching the Biographies of

Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane

When I told a friend of mine that I was writing another book about
Laura Ingalls Wilder, a surprised expression came over her face.
“What?” she asked wonderingly. “Is there anything else we need to
know about her?” I tried to explain to her what it was I was planning
to do, but I wonder now whether what I told her sounded very con-
vincing. That there is plenty of room for further study of one of the
twentieth century’s most popular children’s authors, however, is a
given. Adding to that is the success of her daughter, Rose Wilder
Lane, as a novelist, short-story writer, and literary journalist and her
crucial assistance to Wilder in the production of her Little House
novels. As I argue in the next chapter, future studies of Wilder’s lit-
erary output will have to be conducted with full recognition of the
close collaboration that occurred between mother and daughter in
the writing of the books, and therefore it makes eminent sense to
treat the two in tandem, which is what I have done in this book.
Although Lane had worked previously with her mother on sever-
al writing projects and had attempted to tutor her in the writing of

1
 2 Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane

articles for national magazines, it was only in 1930 that an intense

collaboration began between the two as they set to work to produce
autobiographical novels of the frontier aimed at children’s audi-
ences. Wilder’s original autobiography, “Pioneer Girl,” never found
a publisher, but it served as a resource for seven of the eight Little
House books, which appeared regularly between 1932 and 1943
(Farmer Boy, the second in the series, was based upon the boyhood
experiences of Wilder’s husband). The decade of the thirties, which
witnessed the publication of Wilder’s first five books as well as of
Lane’s two most important novels, was a time of tremendous social,
political, and cultural ferment and conflict, and most of the chapters
in this book grapple with issues emerging out of this creative and
conflicted environment.
Lane not only collaborated with her mother on the texts of all of
the Little House books, but also actually lived at Rocky Ridge farm
in a house just a few hundred yards away from her parents until the
middle of 1935. While the two were in essential agreement in their
views about politics, which found expression to varying degrees in
the books of both, they frequently found themselves enervated by
the intense, multisided, and contradictory mother-daughter rela-
tionship that simultaneously drew them together and drove them
apart. Both of them, while highly individualistic and creative in their
own ways, were very much products of their times, so any analysis
of Wilder and Lane as authors must be, in part at least, a discussion
of the depression decade and the powerful cultural and political
forces that coursed through it.
The Stock Market Crash of 1929, while not directly causing the
economic debacle of the thirties, set in motion a series of events that
collectively brought into being the worst economic calamity in
American history. Not only was capitalism in crisis, but also Ameri-
can democracy appeared to be in danger. Wilder’s Little House
books and much of Lane’s writing during the 1930s were, to one de-
gree or another, responses to the challenges that people all around
the United States were experiencing. Ironically, the man in the White
House, Franklin D. Roosevelt, elicited Wilder and Lane’s scorn and
ire, although he, more than anyone else, was responsible for saving
capitalism at a time when extremists of the right and left, not to men-
tion totalitarians, were taking over in other parts of the world. In
Lane’s case, the hatred the president inspired in her was close to
pathological.
 Approaching the Biographies of Wilder and Lane 3

Added to their growing political concerns were constant worries

about money. Lane, in addition, seemed to be going through a pro-
longed midlife crisis, unsure of where to concentrate her writing tal-
ents, haunted by the effects of the aging process, uncertain about her
identity, and beset by philosophical anxieties. Psychologists suggest
that people commonly respond to anxiety by resorting to various de-
fense mechanisms, such as regression, repression, identification, and
projection. Lane longed to escape from Rocky Ridge and from the
confining embrace of her mother, which she finally managed to do
in 1935 at age forty-eight. Beyond that, she was looking for a com-
fortable philosophical home, one she eventually discovered in ex-
treme right-wing libertarian politics. Her relationship with her par-
ents, her writing career, and her psychological and philosophical
needs, thus, were all bound up together.
Wilder’s personality, while much less tortured and complex than
her daughter’s, was likewise highly charged and ambitious. With re-
gard to her political and social views, she too sought to find a home
of a sort that resembled the treasured farmhouse at Rocky Ridge that
she and her husband, Almanzo, had so energetically and lovingly
built and expanded over a period of almost two decades. She had no
desire to leave Mansfield, the small town in Missouri where she had
resided since 1894, but she also was able to find an intellectual refuge
during a time of troubles. In her case, that was the remembered fron-
tier of her childhood, imagined through the lens of memory as she
tried to reconstruct scenes that had occurred five or six decades ear-
lier. Lane’s two frontier novels written during the period—Let the
Hurricane Roar and Free Land—also hearkened back to frontier his-
tory to relate tales of heroic individualism and fierce courage in the
face of unremitting hardship and challenge. Wilder’s and Lane’s re-
sponses to the thirties, in other words, involved both physical escape
and metaphorical escape into the safe havens of libertarian political
philosophy and mythologized history.
If mother and daughter were writing a kind of history as they con-
structed their fictional accounts, they also engaged in two other ma-
jor literary genres during their writing careers: biography and auto-
biography. Lane, a basically self-trained journalist and writer of
fiction, advanced her career as a writer for the San Francisco Bulletin
and then as a freelancer by writing biographical sketches as well as
full-scale biographical treatments of Henry Ford, Herbert Hoover,
and Jack London. In 1919, she also wrote a thinly veiled autobio-
 4 Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane

graphical novel, Diverging Roads, which was based loosely upon her
life in California as a career woman during the teens. It was she who
in 1930 got her mother going on writing her autobiography, which
they hoped to serialize in a national magazine. When that project
failed and a children’s book editor suggested that Wilder draw upon
some of her stories to write a fictionalized account for children, her
career as a children’s novelist was born.
The appeals of biography and autobiography for readers are ap-
parent in any bookstore or library in America, where long shelves
and whole sections bulge with the incredibly large and varied out-
put of authors who have chosen to write about their own lives or
those of others. We cannot seem to get our fill of reading about oth-
er people’s experiences, and increasing numbers of us seem com-
pelled to write about our own. Literary critics and scholars have not
been so convinced of the allure and benefits of the genres. Post-
structuralist theorists, beginning in the late 1960s, proclaimed “the
death of the author,” and they and postmodernists argued that there
are no stable identities to be discovered, no grand narratives to
relate, no essential realities to pass on to others. Postmodernist the-
ories from the seventies onward, with their notions of the self as
fragmented, discontinuous, and ephemeral, challenged the assump-
tions of traditional biography. Earlier, during the reign of the New
Critics in the forties and fifties, the connection between author and
text was severed, and later efforts by New Historicists and others to
reinject historical context and biographical information into the
analysis of literature did not fully satisfy those who believe that
knowledge about an author’s background and intentions in writing
a text may be highly relevant to interpreting it.
I, as a historian, am biased toward treating historical context and
personal history with care and consideration. But, like others of my
ilk, I am constantly aware of the difficulties, ambiguities, lacunae,
false leads, misimpressions, slanted assumptions, and downright er-
rors that often inject themselves into the process and crop up in the
historical and biographical record. Historians do not need to be re-
minded of their own weaknesses and failures and those of other re-
searchers in their attempts to ferret out the evidence, apply correct
theoretical concepts and assumptions, and make judicious interpre-
tations. While aiming at the truth, we realize that we often fall short
of it. Most of us are not yet ready to abandon the notion of corre-
spondence between “what happened” and the records we produce
 Approaching the Biographies of Wilder and Lane 5

of it. What we are willing to admit is that our reconstructions of the

past are always imperfect and subject to revision, as new evidence,
methods, conceptual schemes, and interpretive tools are advanced.
We recognize that many different stories can be told about the same
phenomenon, but we also know in our bones that some stories are
better (that is, more accurate, more truthful, or productive of war-
ranted assertable belief) than others and that some are so far off the
mark that they don’t deserve anybody’s time or energy.
“Biography is apparently prosperous,” literary critic Catherine
Peters writes, “but it is also uneasy. Modern critical theory, we know,
is scornful of the idea that the text can be related to its author’s life
in any useful or significant way.” Weighing in from the writer’s point
of view, John Updike opines, “The main question concerning liter-
ary biography is, surely, Why do we need it at all? When an author
has devoted his life to expressing himself, and, if a poet or a writer
of fiction, has used the sensations and critical events of his life as his
basic material, what of significance can a biographer add to the
record? Most writers lead quiet lives or, even if they don’t, are of in-
terest to us because of the words they set down in what had to be
quiet moments.”1
But avid consumers are not put off by such comments or by warn-
ings that such works can be misleading, untrue, basely motivated, or
just plain dull. “Biographers can only be unauthentic, can only get it
wrong, can only lie, can only substitute their own story for the story
of their announced subject,” cautions literary critic Stanley Fish. Read-
ers of biographies, in turn, take their lumps from Elizabeth Hard-
wick, who chides “the contemporary appetite for tawdry revela-
tion.” Going one step further, Joyce Carol Oates attaches the label
“pathography” to works intended to tear down their subjects, usu-
ally dead and unable to answer back.2
The biographer’s task is never a simple one. Arnold Rampersad,
a practitioner of the craft, admits that “all aspects of biography are
problematical, with biography itself being problematical in that it
purports to do something—recover a life—that is patently impos-
sible to do.” Attempting to understand other times and cultures,
searching for elusive facts, remaining unaware of many if not most
of the people, places, and events that structured their subjects’ lives,
lacking access to the interior recesses of their minds, usually lacking
expertise in psychological theory and practice, and limited in the
space available to them to tell their stories, biographers necessarily
 6 Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane

have to settle for something less than “the truth, the whole truth, and
nothing but the truth.” Furthermore, as Jay Parini, author of several
literary biographies, notes, “I know I do bring my own perception of
reality, my own prejudices and predilections, my deepest fears and
fondest hopes, to bear on my subject.” None of that, he asserts, has
distorted the truth of his work.3 I am not sure how he can be certain
of that, but at least if a biographer is aware of the dangers and pit-
falls surrounding the task, he or she has a better chance of tran-
scending them and arriving at an approximation of the truth.
Autobiography poses its own special difficulties. While the auto-
biographer does have the advantage of writing about his or her own
life, which should be as well known to the person as to anybody else,
imperfect memories, failure to pay attention all the time, inability to
understand the social forces operating and the social contexts in
which one was living, as well as self-interested motives, dreams,
delusions, and the urge to wreak revenge on one’s enemies consti-
tute a few of the impediments to truth-telling. “Because the autobi-
ographer often dresses up in fictions and disguises himself in slant-
ed fact,” cautions Herbert Leibowitz, “the reader must pass like a
secret agent across the borders of actuality and myth, following its
winding trail of hallowed lies and profane truths.” Even for mem-
oirists intent on telling the truth, memory falters. Rather than con-
sisting of a stable, static record of the past, it constantly undergoes
unconscious revision, being constructed, as well as behaving like a
mirror on the past.4
Thus, although many readers may come to autobiography as-
suming that authors are simply presenting verifiable facts of a life,
by now we should have learned the lesson that fictions are inextri-
cably intertwined with facts in any autobiographical presentation.
“Obviously, then, there is no such thing as a ‘uniquely’ true, correct,
or even faithful autobiography,” observes psychologist Jerome Bru-
ner. Such writings can never be simple statements about a “life as
lived,” for no such thing exists, he asserts. A life, rather, is always
constructed or construed by the act of autobiography: “Construal
and reconstrual are interpretive. Like all forms of interpretation,
how we construe our lives is subject to our intentions, to the inter-
pretive conventions available to us, and to the meanings imposed
upon us by the usages of our culture and language.”5
Women’s autobiography entails its own challenges. While men’s
lives tend to be focused outward, where records are external and
 Approaching the Biographies of Wilder and Lane 7

public, women’s lives traditionally were directed more inwardly,

where less can be known about how they interacted with their fel-
low human beings or how they made a direct impact upon society.6
Ultimately, the difference resolves into a matter of power, for in most
cultures throughout most of human history men have managed to
maintain domination through a wide variety of means, mostly with
the complicity of women, forced or unforced. Writing an autobiog-
raphy makes one vulnerable, especially when the author goes be-
yond stating bare facts. “Psychologically painful experiences and
elusive truths are difficult matters to expose to strangers,” writes Es-
telle C. Jelinek, who goes on to note that when the autobiographer is
a woman, it causes even greater trepidation. Women came to sense
that they were different from, other than, or outside of the male-
dominated world, thus making them a poor fit for it. “This sense of
alienation from the male world is very real,” Jelinek goes on, “but
there also exists the positive delineation of a female culture, a women’s
world.”7 It is this women’s culture that stands out in Wilder’s Little
House books and much of Lane’s fiction, but both of them also de-
voted a significant amount of their attention to the more social and
political aspects of the outside world, thus establishing a link be-
tween the two realms.
A particular hazard in trying to say anything about Laura Ingalls
Wilder is the strong sense of attachment that so many of her readers
develop toward her. Not content to read her books through once,
they often reread them many times, devour anything else about her
that they can, visit the sites where she lived, get on Internet chat lines
to talk about her, even name daughters after her or have doll collec-
tions representing characters in her books. They often develop very
firm opinions about how it was living on the frontier and are end-
lessly curious about the actual figures behind the fictional charac-
ters and about facts regarding people who are introduced in the
books. Many of them are heartbroken to discover that some of the
people mentioned in the books did not exist, that names have some-
times been changed, and that episodes have been reconstructed
or totally fabricated. Many especially resist having to learn that
Wilder’s daughter, Rose, played a crucial role in manufacturing the
manuscripts that became the books. The phenomenon resembles the
never-ending debate among a wide variety of groups who have an
investment in Shakespeare’s identity and literary output. As Peter
Holland notes, “Shakespeare’s biography has long been annexed by
 8 Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane

special-interest groups for their version of the person, for their cre-
ation of the Shakespeare that best appeals to them.” This temptation
for readers to expect and demand certain renditions of their hero’s
life applies with special force to many fans of Laura Ingalls Wilder.
Norman White puts it well when he states, “What often gets in the
way of telling truths about someone’s life is not the biographer’s dis-
tortions or myopia, but the reader’s preconceptions about what
should be there, the way it should be told, and the conclusions which
should be drawn.”8
When it comes to Laura Ingalls Wilder, the chief drawback to
achieving a full and penetrating picture of her life is the paucity of
sources available informing us about what she was really thinking
and feeling. Ironically, her daughter wrote and saved diaries and
journals and sent friends and associates hundreds of long, often
highly revealing letters over the course of her life. We can indeed as-
certain a great deal about the specific traumas, exhilarations, joys,
sorrows, challenges, and triumphs that helped make her such a fas-
cinating, complex, and contradictory character. Relatively little of
this sort of material is available for Wilder. Included are a few letters,
some journals kept during journeys that she took, reports of friends
and neighbors, scattered jottings, and notes that have been pre-
served. Much of what we know about her ideas, values, and person-
al inclinations must be inferred from her books and other writings.
To me, her semimonthly columns published in the Missouri Ruralist
during the late teens and early twenties are especially revealing. Be-
yond that, the best information available derives from letters, jour-
nals, and diaries of her daughter, Rose, which must be read with a
certain amount of care, taking account of their biases and point of
view. Clearly, the single most important relationship for each person
was that between mother and daughter, so any discussion of either’s
personality must be one that takes account of both of them.
Biography traditionally formed the backbone of history and was
closely allied with it. To Thomas Carlyle, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and
others of their persuasion, history was, in essence, biography—espe-
cially the biography of “great men.” Eventually, biography seemed
to sever its traditional umbilical cord to history, asserting its inde-
pendence as an independent genre, but history has never, on that ac-
count, been willing to proceed without maintaining an important
place for biography within its purview. With the rise of the New So-
cial History during the 1970s, it appeared that biography might be
 Approaching the Biographies of Wilder and Lane 9

squeezed out by quantifiers, social science theorists, and other cutting-

edge scholars, many of whom denigrated the claims of individual
biography. But, to paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of biography’s
demise were greatly exaggerated, and history and biography remain
firmly entwined as complementary approaches to seeking the truth
about the past.
Historical study during the past several decades has felt the same
intellectual winds that have blown across all the humanities and
social sciences. In the same spirit as literary critic Terry Eagleton,
whose book After Theory does not propose to bury theory but argues
rather for its central and continuing importance in cultural studies,
Robert Berkhofer advises his fellow historians that it will be impossi-
ble for them to try to return to the innocence of pretheoretical times,
before the waves of structuralism, poststructuralism, postmodern-
ism, deconstruction, postcolonialism, feminism, and a raft of other
theoretical approaches appeared on the scene, beginning around the
late 1960s. These movements collectively challenged traditional his-
torical concepts and practices, Berkhofer notes, by “raising doubts
about the discovery of truth and the foundations of knowledge, the
autonomy and unity of the ‘individual’ as agent and subject, the ba-
sis of disciplinary boundaries and practices, and the stability of mean-
ing in language.” The conceptual revolutions that swept through his-
tory and other disciplines during these years instilled new vigor in
them but also left behind little firm ground upon which to stand. The
rapidly shifting array of new theories and methods exploded old par-
adigms, raised new questions, blurred disciplinary boundaries, and
required new ways of thinking.9
Historians, however, should not have been overly surprised to ob-
serve that within a short period of time discipline after discipline, af-
ter partially jettisoning history temporarily, began reintroducing it
into their repertoire as something “new.” Thus, the New Historicism,
seeking to install works of literature within their shifting historical
contexts, became a fad in literary studies, and scholars began notic-
ing “historic turns” taking place in many other disciplines within the
human sciences.10 The impulse to “historicize” sociology, political
science, anthropology, and a variety of other disciplines, including
literary studies, has set itself against decontextualizing theories dur-
ing the past couple of decades.11 Most historians continued to do
what they had always done; they had never accepted the wisdom of
abandoning their pursuit of historical context, causal connections,
 10 Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane

biographical study, structural relationships, and institutional devel-

opment. Throughout the relatively brief existence of professional
historical studies in the United States, questions about the nature of
historical facts, the possibility of objectivity, methods of interpreta-
tion, causal analysis, imputations of progress, and other similar is-
sues had frequently occupied the forefront and had evolved through
various stages. The counsel of wisdom now, as always, is to practice
humility in presenting our results and interpretations, to accept the
limits and constraints within which we operate, to express willing-
ness to change our opinions when new evidence surfaces or new the-
ories and interpretations prove their worth, and always to acknowl-
edge the tentativeness of historical (and biographical) knowledge.
If I adhere to any historical school, it is one that recognizes and tries
to assimilate complexity, ambiguity, contradiction, paradox, and un-
certainty in the past, while at the same time it seeks to identify
patterns and regularities where they exist and to make distinctions
where they apply. I take my stand with Michael Kammen, who
approaches history with “candid skepticism” and for whom “the
process of knowing involves large dollops of context, contingency,
and change. Ultimately, it may be the process rather than the product
that matters most.” The product always remains important, howev-
er, and we continuously work to make it more accurate, comprehen-
sive, and indeed true, even as we acknowledge how short we usual-
ly fall of our ambition in this regard. I agree with Keith Windschuttle
when he says, “The study of history is essentially a search for the
truth. Without a claim to be pursuing truth, writing history would be
indistinguishable in principle from writing a novel about the past. A
work that does not aim at truth may be many things but not a work
of history.” In their eminently sensible Telling the Truth about History,
Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob provide a useful ap-
proach they call “practical realism,” which “thwarts the relativists by
reminding them that some words and conventions, however social-
ly constructed, reach out to the world and give a reasonably true de-
scription of its contents.”12 Though modest and tentative, such a goal
provides all the incentive we need to turn over every piece of evi-
dence we can and to call on every theoretical approach that is rele-
vant to advance our knowledge of and make sense of our subject.
In historical study, analysis and synthesis proceed hand in glove.
Historians seek to generalize about their subjects, but they also as-
sume that individuals, while influenced and constrained in a variety
 Approaching the Biographies of Wilder and Lane 11

of ways by their fellows, their situations, and their surroundings, re-

tain considerable leeway to make choices about what they will do to
exercise the power they possess to accomplish their ends. If I have a
guiding motto as a historian, it is, “Expect the unexpected.”
Who would ever have thought that a sixty-five-year-old woman
living in the Missouri Ozarks who had never written a significant
piece of fiction in her life would emerge a dozen years later as one
of the most beloved children’s authors in American history and that
her books would still be avidly read today, three-quarters of a cen-
tury later? Who would have predicted that the places where she
grew up would become destinations for countless thousands of loy-
al fans and admirers from all over the globe? Who would have
guessed that her daughter, who played a huge role in producing and
marketing those books, would abandon her own fiction-writing ca-
reer immediately after achieving her greatest literary triumph and
then devote the rest of her life to a completely different field of en-
deavor—political philosophy?
Both Wilder and Lane have attracted considerable popular and
scholarly critical attention, especially during the past two decades or
so. The first investigator to research them in depth was William T.
Anderson, who began his studies as a thirteen-year-old schoolboy
after spending a summer vacation working at the Wilder homesite
in De Smet. His many pamphlets, articles, and books, ranging from
popular magazine treatments and books to heavily footnoted schol-
arly journal articles, have established him as the best-informed stu-
dent of Wilder’s life, and, along with William Holtz, he fits that des-
ignation regarding Rose Wilder Lane as well.13
Children’s literature specialists, not surprisingly, were the first
group to publish extensively on Wilder’s writings, and they contin-
ue to play an important role in extending our knowledge about her.
Articles about her and her books have appeared with some fre-
quency in journals such as Children’s Literature, Children’s Literature
in Education, and The Lion and the Unicorn. Jane M. Subramanian’s
comprehensive 1997 annotated bibliography of works on Wilder in-
dicates that the 1980s was the decade when scholarly interest in and
publication about her picked up significantly in the form of popular
magazine articles as well as scholarly articles, books, master’s the-
ses, and doctoral dissertations. Meanwhile, articles and edited vol-
umes written by William Holtz paved the way in directing serious
attention at Rose Wilder Lane and her work. While there had been
 12 Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane

some excellent work on the mother-daughter collaboration that pro-

duced the Little House books, beginning with Rosa Ann Moore’s
original articles on the subject, the first of which came out in 1975,
Holtz’s controversial 1993 biography The Ghost in the Little House: A
Life of Rose Wilder Lane, which argued that Lane deserved major cred-
it for writing the books, raised the stakes of the debate. Since then,
serious discussion of Wilder’s work has had to grapple with the is-
sue. My book of essays on Wilder the following year took for grant-
ed that a collaboration had occurred between the two and attempt-
ed to address a number of questions emanating from that situation.14
Before William Anderson produced a brief but authoritative biog-
raphy of Wilder in 1992, Donald Zochert and Janet Spaeth had
published their own studies on her. The former focused upon Wild-
er’s childhood, and the latter was part of the Twayne series on Amer-
ican authors, combining biography and literary analysis. Virginia L.
Wolf’s Little House on the Prairie: A Reader’s Companion provided an
insightful reading of the entire series, dealing with a variety of ques-
tions and themes, including historical context, environment, gender,
technology, heroism, and national identity. Toward the end of the
decade, two major books appeared within a year of each other, fur-
thering our knowledge of Wilder as a person and of her literary out-
put. Ann Romines’s Constructing the Little House: Gender, Culture, and
Laura Ingalls Wilder provided a creative and provocative interpreta-
tion of Wilder’s books and brought to the fore several themes and
issues that bore further investigation. Referring to herself as a “fem-
inist scholar with gynocritical and (new) historicist leanings,” Ro-
mines, in her first and fourth chapters, engaged in feminist analysis,
just as a growing number of other scholars were beginning to do at
the time. Chapter 2, “Indians in the House,” discussed a topic that
soon attracted increasing attention in scholarly journals, and chap-
ter 3, on materialism and consumerism, reflected a growing schol-
arly interest in that area. My 1998 biography dealt in some detail
with Wilder’s last six decades in Mansfield, Missouri, discussing ex-
tensively the writing collaboration she worked out with her daugh-
ter.15
That same year, the Hoover Presidential Library hosted a confer-
ence, “Laura Ingalls Wilder and the American Frontier,” featuring
papers by Romines, Elizabeth Jameson, Anita Clair Fellman, Ann
Weller Dahl, and myself. William Anderson presided over the ses-
sions and the ensuing discussions, and Dwight M. Miller of the
 Approaching the Biographies of Wilder and Lane 13

Hoover Library edited a volume containing the session papers. In it,

Romines and I spoke mainly about our new books. Jameson provid-
ed a feminist analysis of Wilder and her writings, a theme she also
addressed in scholarly articles. Fellman, also writing from a feminist
viewpoint, provided a preview of the book she was working on
about the impact of Wilder’s writings upon all aspects of American
culture, from the book publishing industry and the mass media to
education and politics.16
Meanwhile, she and Julia Ehrhardt authored two of the most im-
portant studies of the cooperative writing process that occurred be-
tween Wilder and Lane, in addition dealing with the political impli-
cations of that collaboration. Fellman’s splendid “Laura Ingalls
Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane: The Politics of a Mother-Daughter Re-
lationship” is perhaps the most influential single critical article ever
published about Wilder’s writing. Drawing upon psychoanalytical
theory and feminist scholarship, it deftly links Lane’s psychological
tensions and the troubled relationship between mother and daugh-
ter with the cultural context to illuminate the two women’s attitudes,
behavior, and writing. Covering some of the same ground, Julia C.
Ehrhardt’s chapter on Lane in her book Writers of Conviction insight-
fully connects her personal politics to her professional writing ca-
reer. She locates the roots of her shift to an extreme form of right-
wing ideology in the creative malaise Lane suffered during the 1930s
and the opportunity afforded by the Great Depression for her to
transfer her intellectual energies into anti–New Deal polemics.17
Of the many other articles on Wilder and Lane published during
the past couple of decades, several merit special mention for the
themes and issues with which they grapple. Suzanne Rahn’s dis-
cussion of Little Town on the Prairie is notable for illustrating the im-
portance of the theme of community in Wilder’s writing. Claudia
Mills takes a frequently discussed subject—the values expressed in
the Little House books—and places it within the purview of theories
about moral development. Ann Romines notes the architectural
theme that weaves its way throughout the Little House series. The
subject that has probably been more discussed than any other and
which certainly has generated the most controversy is Wilder’s treat-
ment of Native Americans in her books. Sharon Smulders, Philip
Heldrich, Frances W. Kaye, Penny T. Linsenmayer, and Donna M.
Campbell have all weighed in with important discussions on the
subject. Regarding Lane, in an edited collection on “middlebrow
 14 Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane

modern” writers, Campbell establishes Lane’s credentials for being

included within that group.18
In addition to publications already mentioned, many articles,
whether written from a feminist viewpoint or not, have thrown light
on the gender issue in Wilder’s and Lane’s writing. Ann Romines,
who treats it extensively in her book on Wilder, also takes it up in a
piece on The Long Winter. Elizabeth Jameson focuses on Wilder’s
treatment of her mother in her article on the female frontier.19
Also noteworthy are two recently published books by Fellman
and Pamela Smith Hill. Most students of Lane and Wilder have fo-
cused directly upon their lives and writings. Fellman takes up the
more elusive task of trying to delineate the impact Wilder had upon
her readers and upon the culture in general. Her findings are in-
triguing, and her contention that the Little House books paved the
way for America’s conservative shift to Reaganism during the eight-
ies is especially provocative and will no doubt generate considerable
discussion and debate. Hill’s book on Wilder’s writing career suc-
cinctly synthesizes what is known about her developing interest in
writing and about her maturing skill as an author. Hill’s contention
that Lane functioned more like an aggressive editor of her mother’s
writing than like a true collaborator will also no doubt generate fur-
ther debate.20
Two other welcome recent publications are a new, expanded edi-
tion of Wilder’s farm journalism and a collection of Lane’s literary
journalism. Compendiums like these help facilitate interest in and
the development of new perspectives on the work and lives of the
two women.21
It is clear that a great deal of progress has been made in uncover-
ing information about and interpreting the lives and careers of both
Wilder and Lane. Some of these gains have derived from recent in-
tellectual trends in the disciplines—feminism, multiculturalism,
postmodernism, and reader-response or reception theory—as well
as from new research on mother-daughter relationships, consumer-
ism and material culture, ideology, and the publishing industry.
Much of the progress that has been attained derives from tradition-
al methods—simply slogging away in the texts, manuscript collec-
tions, and other conventional sources. Some of it (the most promi-
nent example being the work of Ann Romines) has explicitly aligned
itself with postmodernism and other novel approaches.
What should be the direction of further research? I originally
 Approaching the Biographies of Wilder and Lane 15

turned to Wilder’s novels as a way of learning something about

small-town social life on the midwestern frontier. Having graduat-
ed from high school in Monett, Missouri, which is a hundred miles
west of Mansfield on Highway 60, and after living for a decade in
Brookings, South Dakota, forty miles east of De Smet on Highway
14, I felt a measure of rapport for the kinds of milieus in which
Wilder lived almost all of her life. After completing a book of essays
on her and then a biography, I had thought my work was finished,
but as time went by I found myself coming back to her as a subject
for conference papers and publications. This interest in Wilder nat-
urally spilled over into curiosity about Lane. Only after several years
did I realize that my intellectual forays actually possessed an over-
arching unity to them. Without being guided by any particular
methodology or critical perspective, I began to think of what I was
doing as a series of probes that centered around several themes:
place, time, and culture. The subjects addressed under those rubrics
were, for the most part, ones that neither merited book-length treat-
ment nor could be easily squeezed into more conventional thematic
treatments. They could stand alone, but they could also be woven to-
gether to add to our understanding of the biographies and literary
output of mother and daughter. I also understood that any discus-
sion of Wilder and Lane from now on must start from the knowledge
of the two women’s collaboration in the process of producing the Lit-
tle House books. In such fashion, the book you hold in your hands
gradually evolved.
Thus, in the text that follows, Chapter 2 sets the stage for what is
to come by pulling together various strands of the discussion and de-
bate over the issue of authorship of the Little House books as it has
been addressed previously by Anderson, Holtz, Fellman, Ehrhardt,
Hill, myself, and others. By providing my “take” on this fraught sub-
ject, I intend, in brief, concentrated form, to provide a platform for
what is to follow.
The rest of the volume is divided into three sections—one devot-
ed to place, one to time, and one to culture—revolving around spa-
tial, temporal, and sociopolitical perspectives. Chapter 3, the single
chapter in Section II, takes up one aspect of the general theme of
“place” by focusing upon the unusual emotional resonance that “lit-
tle houses”—or “home”—possessed for both women. In their per-
sonal lives and in their writings, houses played a central role, and
the attitudes and values surrounding these notions no doubt had
 16 Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane

much to do with the appeal that their writing (especially Wilder’s)

had for their readers.
Section III, on the subject of “time,” launches three probes into as-
pects of biography and history. Chapter 4 picks a single year—1932,
the year Wilder’s first book was published—to pose the question of
how a biographical treatment might turn out differently if the biog-
rapher possessed the luxury of dwelling at length on a variety of
themes and topics that often get left out all together because of space
limitations. Chapter 5 compares the lives and historical approaches
of Wilder and Frederick Jackson Turner, the United States’ most in-
fluential historian of the frontier. Both authors placed the settlement
process at the center of their writing, relating triumphal stories of
European-Americans occupying the land, and in so doing they di-
minished the importance of Native Americans in the process. This,
no doubt, explains in large part why such a surge of criticism has
been directed against both authors of late. Chapter 6 redirects atten-
tion toward Lane, examining some of her views on history. To do so,
it relates her unpublished history book on Missouri to Thomas Hart
Benton’s vibrant, controversial mural, A Social History of the State of
Missouri, that he was painting on the walls in the state capitol at the
same time that she was working on her book. Lane and Benton
shared similar backgrounds, and while their takes on history differed
considerably, their works constituted prime examples of the turn to-
ward history that occurred in the United States during the 1930s.
Section IV, on the subject of “culture,” focuses upon the values
Wilder brought to her writing, the moral dilemmas surrounding her
depiction of American Indians in her novels, and the way in which
the depression milieu and public reaction against Roosevelt’s New
Deal influenced Wilder’s and Lane’s political views and led them to
inject some of their political values into their writing. Chapter 7 dis-
cusses how Wilder’s regular columns in the Missouri Ruralist during
the late teens and early twenties provided her, in effect, with a use-
ful apprenticeship in writing regularly for a broad audience, an ex-
perience that served her well when she began writing children’s
novels later on. I argue that, as a whole, Wilder’s farm journalism
helps us to understand that she was a highly capable writer by the
time she turned her hand to fiction. The pieces also provide the best
picture we have of Wilder’s values, worldview, and mode of think-
ing. Chapter 8 takes up the highly controversial topic of Wilder’s
treatment of Indians in her books and especially in Little House on the
 Approaching the Biographies of Wilder and Lane 17

Prairie. I rehearse the positions that have been taken by previous au-
thors on the topic and conclude that Wilder—while deficient by
present standards in her views on the subject and not always en-
lightened in her depiction of Native Americans in her books—made
an effort to show the complexities that were involved in the subject
and left us with books that can serve as vehicles for further learning.
The question of exactly how the books should be used in schools, es-
pecially for the youngest readers, needs to be kept separate from an
evaluation of Wilder’s own views and writing output. Finally, in
Chapter 9, I take up one of the most interesting and significant sub-
jects regarding mother and daughter—their conservative or liber-
tarian political views and how these may or may not have found a
place in their writings. It is no secret by now that both Wilder and
Lane hated Roosevelt and shuddered at the damage they believed
he and his New Dealers were doing to the country. I argue that
Lane’s visceral hatred of FDR transformed itself into a positive iden-
tification with libertarian ideology, which largely resulted from its
capacity to fill the philosophical void that had haunted her for a long
time. The presence of right-wing ideology in Lane’s books is obvi-
ous and massive. In Wilder’s case, the story is more complicated.
While undoubtedly conservative in their political slant, the Little
House books’ political messages remained generally implicit or sub-
tler and are primarily to be found in the last three volumes.
As noted above, these chapters are meant to be probes that allow
us to investigate significant questions and issues surrounding Wild-
er and Lane, both as persons and as writers. If the chapter on 1932
seems somewhat playful, it is meant that way in part. But it also is
entirely serious, for after years of researching and thinking about the
subject, I am only more convinced of the complexity, mutability, am-
biguity, contradictoriness, and downright messiness of history and
the shapes of people’s lives. If readers wonder what Babe Ruth has
to do with Laura Ingalls Wilder, I can answer them that both were
examples of the rapidly rising influence of celebrity culture in Amer-
ica and that they were connected to each other and to Mansfield
through Ruth’s teammate Carl Mays, who also was a resident of the
town. But also I see this episode as an example of the endless multi-
plication of lines of connection and influence that wrap themselves
around people in their everyday lives. If we concentrate too heavily
upon the obvious and well-trod linkages and causal patterns that
connect people with their peers and social surroundings, we may
 18 Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane

deny ourselves the opportunity to perceive other, less obvious con-

nections and patterns.
I became a historian, in part, because I was a baseball fan and play-
er first. I know that the game isn’t over until the last batter is out, that
on any given day any team can beat any other team, and that you
have to play the game before you print the results. Yes, history re-
veals many regularities, tendencies, and predictable outcomes. But
it also often turns out differently, in the long run at least, than most
people would or could have predicated. History is full of surprises,
and the writing careers of Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder
Lane constitute two of its most remarkable surprises.
 I

Authorship

Who Wrote the Books?

That two twentieth-century writers as important as Laura Ingalls

Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane would emerge from a small country
town in the Missouri Ozarks was improbable. That they were moth-
er and daughter adds charm to the story. That the daughter was the
first to win recognition for herself as a literary figure increases the
tale’s attraction. That she deserves credit for inducing her mother to
start her novel-writing career, played a crucial role in producing
those books, and called upon her talents and literary connections to
get the books published makes it irresistible. Finally, it is ironic that
the mother retains continuing appeal today as a wildly popular
children’s author, while the daughter, despite her earlier start in
the business, is remembered primarily by a small coterie of literary
scholars and specialists.
Literature appeals to people on many different levels. For the nov-
elist Henry James, the only absolute requirement of fiction was that
“it be interesting.” Other criteria that have been utilized for evaluat-
ing fiction include dramatic vividness, conviction, intensity, poetic
purity, thematic development, objectivity, detachment, and artful-
ness. Standing out perhaps above all the rest in the minds of many

19
 20 Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane

readers is realism. Stated differently, an author’s ability to create an

air or illusion of reality appears to rank as the highest test of success
in the realm of fiction.1
In churning out the eight children’s novels that would emerge as
the Little House series, Laura Ingalls Wilder managed simultane-
ously to keep her stories interesting and to make them seem realistic
to her young readers. Accomplishing the former, in fact, resulted in
large measure from her success at achieving the latter. Her daughter,
Rose, also gained recognition for producing interesting stories, but
their authenticity and realism seemed slightly suspect to some of her
readers and reviewers. What people did not realize for many years
was that the writing careers of mother and daughter were closely
intertwined. Although rumors sometimes circulated in Mansfield,
Missouri, that Lane had assisted with or even bore major responsi-
bility for the books her mother published, few people suspected the
true nature of the literary relationship that existed between the two.
Only recently have we come to appreciate fully the close collabora-
tion that developed between them over time, as Lane tutored her
mother in writing for publication and then edited, revised, and as-
sisted in the publication of her mother’s magazine articles and
books. Meanwhile, she was able to draw upon stories related to her
by her mother and father in writing some of her own novels and
short stories.
Wilder’s and Lane’s greatest achievements as writers derived
from their ability to translate personal experience into compelling
fiction. Wilder’s Little House series related her own story of grow-
ing up on the midwestern frontier in seven volumes and her hus-
band Almanzo’s boyhood story in an eighth book. Lane’s short sto-
ries collected in Old Home Town drew upon her own experiences and
observations while growing up in Mansfield, and Let the Hurricane
Roar and Free Land were based upon family stories passed on to her
by her parents.
“All writing is autobiographical, just as all dreaming is,” Lane
wrote in a letter to a literary friend of hers. “You write out of your-
self, that is, one of your selves. You detach from your multiple per-
sonality—which we all have—one part of it, and make it the
whole.”2 This observation applied with special force to her and her
mother’s literary careers. So different in many ways, they also
shared many similarities. One thing they shared was a passion for
words and for writing. While their literary output differed consid-
 Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane 21

erably, they both found inspiration in the world as they experienced

and understood it, and they both, in their own inimitable ways,
sought to depict accurately what they had learned about it. The place
to start, then, is with their understanding of what authorship entails
and to delineate the ways in which they assisted each other in ad-
vancing their respective literary careers.
 2

The Mother-Daughter Collaboration

That Produced the Little House Series

Generations of schoolchildren, as well as adults, have derived

great enjoyment from reading the Little House books, assuming that
Laura Ingalls Wilder sat down in her midsixties to write a simple,
straightforward story of her childhood based upon her memories of
growing up on the frontier. Such a notion was satisfying, reassuring,
and encouraging (supporting the idea that it is never too late in life
to commence a great task). The stories—full of fortitude, bravery,
self-reliance, and generosity—reinforced traditional values, widely
held assumptions about the superiority of the American way of life,
and patriotic beliefs about the conditions of American society, pat-
terns of opportunity, and democratic governance. A closer look at the
actual way in which the books were constructed, however, can pro-
vide contemporary readers with a more realistic understanding of
their actual making and a better appreciation that their real contri-
bution to our knowledge is as much mythological as historical. For
some time now, any realistic assessment of the Little House series
has had to start from the proposition that the words on the pages of
the books got there as a result of a continuing collaborative process
that occurred between Wilder and her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane.
Any serious study of Wilder’s writing in the future will likewise

23
 24 Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane

have to be undertaken in the same spirit. Thus, it makes sense at the

outset to set down the outlines of that collaboration and to discuss
how the process worked and what it meant.
After arriving in Missouri in 1894, Laura and Almanzo Wilder
built up their initial forty-acre farm on Rocky Ridge to almost two
hundred acres, transforming it in the process into a paying proposi-
tion. Nevertheless, their personal finances remained precarious, and
as they advanced into old age they depended upon annual income
subsidies from their increasingly famous and successful daughter,
Rose. This caused considerable anxiety for both parents as well as
their only child. During the early 1920s, both mother and daughter
came to believe that the best opportunity for providing for the fi-
nancial independence of the aging couple, and one that would allow
Rose to independently pursue her own writing career, was to enable
her mother to develop her writing ability to a point where she could
earn a reliable stream of royalties by writing articles for popular
magazines. The project never proceeded very far, however, and pe-
tered out after 1925. Rose actually lived at Rocky Ridge with or near
her parents in 1924 and 1925 and again from 1928 to 1935.
It was at Rose’s urging that Wilder in 1930 wrote her autobiogra-
phy with the hope that it might be salable to a magazine. Lane tried
unsuccessfully to peddle this story, “Pioneer Girl,” in serial form to
several magazines in New York, where she maintained a large ac-
quaintanceship in literary and publishing circles. Only Graeme
Lorimer of the Saturday Evening Post liked the story very much,
terming it “a grand piece of work, fascinating material, and most in-
telligent writing.” But with magazines cutting back their manuscript
purchases as the Great Depression settled in and with the Post al-
ready possessing a backlog of that kind of material on file, he felt
compelled to turn it down. Lorimer suggested that the narrative
might have a better chance of getting published if Wilder could re-
work it into fictional form. However, Lane’s agent in New York,
George T. Bye, was not much impressed by the manuscript. “‘Pio-
neer Girl’ didn’t warm me enough the first reading,” he told Lane.
The story lacked drama, he thought, sounding like the work of a
“fine old lady” who was “sitting in a rocking chair and telling a sto-
ry chronologically but with no benefit of perspective or theatre.”1
But Marion Fiery, children’s editor at Alfred A. Knopf, took an in-
terest in a shorter piece that Lane was able to extrude from her
mother’s manuscript by stringing together some of her grandfa-
 The Mother-Daughter Collaboration 25

ther’s stories. Lane called it “When Grandma Was a Little Girl.” Fiery
suggested expanding this story into a picture book for young read-
ers.2 Although Wilder had written a fair amount of not very memo-
rable poetry, most of her writing experience had been with nonfic-
tion, turning out stories and columns for farm newspapers and in
several cases for magazines. Her new assignment did not daunt her,
however; she quickly managed to expand the six- or seven-thousand-
word manuscript into one closer to twenty-five thousand words.
This is what emerged the following year as Little House in the Big
Woods.
It was not published, however, before Lane did additional work
on it, making her own changes and corrections in the manuscript.
She typed it up and had her mother send it on to Fiery in New York,
maintaining the fiction that her only role in the process was as an in-
termediary. Unfortunately, the summer of 1931 saw the country slide
deeper and deeper into the Great Depression, and the Knopf firm de-
cided to close its children’s department as a cost-cutting move. At
Fiery’s urging, Lane and Wilder then approached Harper and Broth-
ers, which the Knopf editor thought would be better situated than
her own firm to promote the book. Virginia Kirkus, an editor at
Harper’s, was delighted on first reading of the manuscript, im-
pressed by the narrative skill of its author. She thought that “the real
magic was in the telling,” she later recalled. “One felt that one was
listening, not reading.” She later considered her “discovery” of Lau-
ra Ingalls Wilder to have been one of the milestones of her book-
publishing career.3
For Wilder, writing her autobiography served as a transitional
step between her earlier farm journalism and dilatory efforts at mag-
azine article writing, on the one hand, and the production of her
popular series of children’s novels, on the other. While of some in-
terest today as a document about life on the post–Civil War frontier,
“Pioneer Girl” displayed few of the endearing qualities that would
make her books so memorable and compelling.4 Without Rose’s ex-
ample, encouragement, advice, editing, and—in places—substan-
tial rewriting of her manuscripts, and without her ability to find a
publisher for them, Wilder probably never would have been able to
extend her reach beyond a limited local and statewide audience.
To get Little House in the Big Woods into publishable form in 1931,
Lane spent about a week making revisions on it and typing the
manuscript for mailing.5 The other seven novels would take more of
 26 Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane

her time; in some cases, it required several months to complete the

task. Nevertheless, it took a long time for Lane to begin to appreciate
fully the true significance of what she was doing for her mother. Con-
cealing her own work in revising the original book manuscript for
publication, Lane disingenuously wrote editor Marian Fiery, “I don’t
know just where or how I come into this, do you? But somehow I do,
because my mother naturally consults me about everything con-
cerning her writing.”6 When she originally asked her agent George
Bye if he would handle the negotiations with the publisher on her
mother’s books and collect the royalties for her, Rose indicated just
how little importance she attached to them. “It’s really awfully de-
cent of you to bother with this small fry; I do appreciate it,” she wrote
Bye. “And I don’t expect you really to bother. I want it to be nothing
more than a bit of semi-annual office routine which will adequately
pay for itself.” She did not take juvenile literature seriously but rather
was intent upon her own work as a novelist and short-story writer.7
Although Lane mentioned the customary and expected things
about her mother’s work when she was asked about it, her main in-
terest, in the beginning at least, seems to have been the additional in-
come the books would earn for the family and the reduced depen-
dence her parents consequently would have on her. If they could
become financially independent as a result of the royalties her moth-
er earned, Lane would be relieved of that worry. As Anita Clair Fell-
man points out, she was intent upon getting out of Mansfield and
away from her mother so that she could reestablish her indepen-
dence and pursue her own writing career, while at the same time ful-
filling her familial obligations to her parents.8 Wilder’s motives in
writing the books, meanwhile, seem to have escalated somewhat as
time went by, and what had at first been a single book expanded into
an eight-book series. From preserving some of the stories her father
had told by putting them down on paper, her ambition evolved into
one of earning a little bit of prestige for herself, then obtaining fi-
nancial independence for her and her husband, and finally telling a
frontier story that would add to historical knowledge.9
During the early and mid-1930s, while she was collaborating with
her mother on the series, Lane underwent a major crisis in her own
life and career. In 1928 she had built an English-style stone cottage
for her parents across the hill from their original frame house, which
she took over for herself as soon as they moved out. Living at Rocky
Ridge farm between 1928 and 1935, Lane was running out of ideas
 The Mother-Daughter Collaboration 27

for her own fiction and was finding it increasingly difficult to churn
out new material. Still able to command good prices for stories,
when inspired, she often found herself coming to a dead end, at a
loss for suitable subjects to develop.
After the Stock Market crashed in October 1929, demand for
Lane’s short stories declined dramatically. The ones that did sell
commanded smaller payments than she had become accustomed to.
She worried constantly about finances. More than merely worrying,
she suffered from deep and prolonged depression. Her financial sit-
uation, health problems, decaying teeth, the oppressive heat, sepa-
ration from her literary friends, and psychological anxiety—all of
these and other factors contributed to what she herself referred to as
a mental illness. In long letters to friends and in gut-spilling diary
and journal entries she related the oppressiveness of the Missouri en-
vironment, how much she loathed living there, and how she longed
to break free from it. She felt trapped, unable to escape. Why she
thought it necessary to stay, however, remains something of a mys-
tery. Certainly she felt an obligation to care for her parents. Yet, when
she finally did leave Missouri for good in 1937, they managed to get
along perfectly well by themselves.10 Nor did she feel compelled to
return to visit them before her father died in 1949.
Rose, who to outsiders always seemed chipper and cheerful, was
undergoing a private hell while she was living at Rocky Ridge work-
ing on her mother’s first three novels. The revisions on the second
book, Farmer Boy, which was initially rejected by Harper and Broth-
ers, required approximately seventy days of her time between March
1932 and March 1933.11 Conducting background research for the
third volume, Little House on the Prairie, Lane and Wilder drove out
to look for the spot where Charles and Caroline Ingalls and their
daughters had lived on the Osage Indian Reservation in 1869 and
1870 (they never did find it because Laura remembered her family’s
cabin as being more like forty miles away from Independence,
Kansas, rather than the thirteen that it actually had been).12 While
Rose felt obliged to assist her mother in putting her books into pub-
lishable form and certainly was pleased about the income that they
generated and the satisfaction they brought to her mother, she bri-
dled at the time that working on them took away from her own writ-
ing. “Have to finish my mother’s goddam juvenile,” she resentfully
entered in her diary on May 10, 1936.13 While her mother’s popular-
ity continually mounted, her own frustration grew apace.
 28 Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane

Two novels that she had written during the late 1920s about life in
the Ozarks—Hill-Billy and Cindy—she considered to be mere trash.
Most of the short stories that she published afterward, also deriving
from her experiences and observations in Missouri, were churned
out relatively quickly for mass-market magazines like Country Gen-
tleman, Ladies Home Journal, and Saturday Evening Post. She took some
real pride in a collection of stories based upon her childhood years
in Mansfield, writing an introduction that tied them together and
publishing the book under the title of Old Home Town in 1935.
This kind of output placed her writing, along with that of writers
such as Edna Ferber and Zona Gale, into the category of “middle-
brow regionalist” fiction. These authors won success in the market-
place, selling their work to major presses and sometimes hitting the
best-seller lists by catering to a rapidly growing middlebrow culture
industry during the twenties and thirties.14 But Lane wanted some-
thing more than commercial success; she desired recognition as the
kind of serious writer chronicled by some literary historians as ex-
emplars during the period from the midtwenties through the late
thirties of “late modernism.”15 She wanted her work to count, to be
judged sophisticated, to make a difference. Moving into middle age,
she longed increasingly to do something of real significance—work
of lasting importance that would elevate her above the level of what
she deemed to be mere “hack writing.” In 1932, the year that her
mother’s first book came out, Lane published Let the Hurricane Roar,
first as a serial in the Saturday Evening Post and later in book form.
The material in it was inspired by tales passed on to her by her par-
ents. The plot was based loosely upon the experiences of her grand-
parents Charles and Caroline Ingalls during the Great Dakota Boom
of the early 1880s. Having listened often to the harrowing story of
the hard winter of 1880–1881, when tiny De Smet had been snowed
in and cut off from railroad service for months, Lane also attempted
several times without success to convert the material into fiction.
(Harrowing blizzard scenes did feature prominently in both Let the
Hurricane Roar and Free Land.) Her most ambitious concept for his-
torical fiction was a plan she sketched out to write a ten-volume his-
torical novel encompassing the entire sweep of American history.
She quickly abandoned the idea, however, as impractical.16
In April 1935, when an invitation arrived from the McBride Pub-
lishing Company to write a historical travelogue of Missouri for a se-
ries of state books that the company was publishing, Lane grabbed
 The Mother-Daughter Collaboration 29

quickly at the offer, influenced in part by the $1,500 advance that

came along with it. Her research quickly took her to the State His-
torical Society of Missouri in Columbia. Unfortunately, through a se-
ries of misunderstandings, the book was never published.17 In 1937,
Lane moved temporarily to New York City, where she took a room
in the Grosvenor Hotel on Fifth Avenue while she was writing Free
Land, a serialized novel based upon stories her father and mother
had told her about their experiences of homesteading in Dakota Ter-
ritory. The book earned $25,000—her largest paycheck. It and Let the
Hurricane Roar, both based upon stories she had heard from her par-
ents, constituted her greatest achievement as a fiction writer. The
following year she bought a farmhouse in Danbury, Connecticut,
and moved there, where she could remain close to the New York lit-
erary scene. After 1938, Rose came to the conclusion that her fiction-
writing career was over and gradually shifted her attention to the
subject that would occupy her for the rest of her life—right-wing po-
litical philosophy.
The collaborative writing process between mother and daughter
that produced the Little House series of children’s novels abounds
with contradictions and ironies. Lane, who was slow to recognize the
significance of the work that she was doing for her mother, was re-
sentful that her mother displayed so little interest in her own work.
Although Wilder took obvious pride in her daughter’s accomplish-
ments and enjoyed showing her off to neighbors and friends in
Mansfield (sometimes holding receptions at Rocky Ridge, where
Lane regaled guests with stories about her adventures in Paris, Al-
bania, and other exotic places), Lane believed that her mother sel-
dom, if ever, actually read the stuff that she wrote. “Oh, it isn’t hard
to keep Mama Bess from reading my books,” she informed her
writer friend Guy Moyston. “She never reads ’em. She just likes to
have ’em around.”18
In her children’s novels, Wilder depicted her family of origin as be-
ing very affectionate and tight-knit. But at Rocky Ridge, while Lane
was living there during the twenties and thirties, relations were any-
thing but pleasant much of the time. Although she usually appeared
happy and gay to others, Lane’s moods frequently turned sour. She
hated listening to the frequent bickering of her parents. Most of all,
there was the constant contest of wills between mother and daugh-
ter—a battle for control that seemed to bring out the worst in each of
their assertive personalities while they lived elbow-to-elbow near
 30 Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane

each other at Rocky Ridge. After one run-in with her mother, Lane
unburdened herself in her journal: “It’s amazing how my mother can
make me suffer.” Thinking back on her childhood, she wailed, “She
made me so miserable when I was a child that I’ve never gotten over
it.”19 Not surprisingly, the state of the mother-daughter bond varied
inversely with the distance separating them. When Lane was far
away from home, the two came to realize how much, in fact, they re-
ally did love each other and tended to forget the petty annoyances as
well as the deep-seated strains and differences dividing them, which
were only accentuated when they lived close by.
In “Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane: The Politics of a
Mother-Daughter Relationship,” Anita Clair Fellman provides an in-
sightful analysis of the factors contributing to the mutual dependency
that rendered the interactions of two such highly independent-minded
individuals so volatile. The daughter, troubled by the experience of her
mother’s controlling behavior while she was a child growing up in
the household and exasperated by her continuing efforts to bind
her to Rocky Ridge even as she was moving into her fifth decade,
bounced back and forth between feelings of love for and obligation
to the older woman, on the one hand, and resentment toward and
desire to escape from her domineering ways, on the other. Wilder,
for her part, was proud of and admired her only child’s evident suc-
cess, sought and depended upon her literary advice and assistance,
and wished for her to be happy and contented. But she also chafed
at Rose’s independent and unorthodox ways, wished her daughter
would marry and raise a family, and longed for the time when she
would be capable of taking care of her own literary business and not
have to rely upon Rose to edit, revise, and market her work. Fellman
describes the resultant mercurial relationship with a vivid metaphor:
“The two women set up an elaborate dance in which Wilder both
sought Lane’s assistance with her writing and resisted it, and Lane
helped with increasing ambivalence, trying to induce gratitude and
guilt for the time and effort she expended. While Wilder never gave
up either her expression of anxiety over the work she was causing
her daughter or her hopes that she could do the writing wholly on
her own, by the early 1930s she came reluctantly to accept her de-
pendence upon Lane’s editing.”20
During the twenties and into the thirties, it was Lane who was the
famous author in Mansfield, while her mother seemed to be being
carried along on the coattails of her fame. Only later, as Wilder kept
 The Mother-Daughter Collaboration 31

churning out new volumes every year or two and Lane abandoned
fiction writing, did it begin to appear that the mother, rather than the
daughter, was the primary literary achiever. The younger person
had been playing the role of mentor, while the older one appeared
as a usually appreciative, but sometimes resentful, trainee. Eventu-
ally, however, student surpassed teacher. Lane never openly accept-
ed any credit for her mother’s work. Wilder, for her part, never ac-
knowledged that anyone else had been involved in the writing of her
books. The two continued to maintain this fiction to the end. They
had to engage in a complicated rigmarole when submitting materi-
al to and communicating with Lane’s agent and with the publishing
company in New York City so as to eliminate any evidence of Rose’s
heavy involvement in the production of the books. As late as 1949,
Wilder was instructing George Bye to consign 10 percent of her roy-
alties from the Little House books to her daughter, because she owed
her “for helping me, at first, in selling my books and for the public-
ity she gave them.” No mention was included of Lane’s editing, re-
vising, restructuring, and, in places, composing of significant sec-
tions of the books.21
Between 1931 and 1935, while working on Wilder’s autobiogra-
phy and on the first three books, the logistics of collaboration were
fairly simple, with Lane occupying her parents’ old farmhouse and
they living on the other side of the hill in the new rock house that she
had built for them in 1928. When Lane set aside her own projects to
work on the Little House books, she and her mother were able to talk
on the telephone any time they wanted, and during some stretches
they got together almost every day over breakfast or tea to talk over
strategy. Wilder’s fourth book, On the Banks of Plum Creek, was fin-
ished mostly in 1936 after Lane had moved to Columbia to research
her book about Missouri. That required that they work separately,
communicating with each other by mail.
The collaborative process that they hammered out can be ob-
served most directly in the many letters passing between them that
have been preserved from the period in which they were working on
By the Shores of Silver Lake during 1937 and 1938. By the time they be-
gan revisions on that book, Rose was living in the Grosvenor Hotel.
Entering her seventies, Wilder discovered that trying to recall peo-
ple and events from her childhood was becoming a harder and hard-
er task. To help jog her memory, Lane sent some pages from her
mother’s “Pioneer Girl” manuscript, composed in 1930, and later
 32 Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane

she instructed George Bye to send her mother a copy of the entire
manuscript. Wilder also used a book that her mother had compiled,
consisting of fragments of poetry, songs, and other remembrances,
to help trigger elusive memories. In addition, she wrote her sister
Grace to inquire about the types of wildflowers they had known in
Dakota Territory. She had already forgotten many of the things she
had written about just seven years earlier. These kinds of devices and
activities served as helpful reminders, but Wilder, aware of her fad-
ing capacities of memory, wrote her daughter that “the sooner I write
my stuff the better.”22
By then, the two had worked out a rather clear division of labor,
although Wilder continued to hope that she could do more of the
work on her own without as much intervention from her daughter.
Lane was teaching her how to block out a book before beginning to
write so that she could envision the final product and see how the
parts fit together. That involved much more than Wilder simply sit-
ting down and writing her recollections and then passing them
along to Lane for typing up and revising. As she explained in a
letter sent in August 1938, “The only way I can write is to wander
along with the story, then rewrite and re-arrange and change it
everywhere.” By then, she had already composed ten chapters of a
“first rough, very rough, draft” of “Hard Winter” (the title was later
changed to “The Long Winter”).23 Clean, neat drafts of Wilder’s
books have been preserved in several libraries and archives. They
obviously are her carefully handwritten copies, following upon one
or more earlier drafts that she had composed in her standard five-
cent tablets.
Mother and daughter had a number of issues to resolve as Lane
began editing and revising Silver Lake toward the end of 1937. Most
important was the question of how to begin the book. Wilder want-
ed to start it at the railroad depot in Tracy, Minnesota, as her family
prepared to move to Dakota Territory in 1879. Lane thought it should
begin earlier, with Aunt Docia’s offer of a job for Pa on the railroad
construction crew, so that readers could learn what had happened
since the end of On the Banks of Plum Creek and about the circum-
stances of their departure from Minnesota. Lane also was having
trouble discerning the central theme of the book: was it the building
of the railroad and establishing towns along the line, or was it the
homesteading process? Ultimately, the underlying challenge, as she
read the manuscript, was structural. By reading carefully, word for
was

after

grown already

between as Its

tenacious swims store

way Langur
rather Fratelli

from they very

is

Nevada after

walking

great

was

in sixth sap

only
the

from

each a can

of which the

and well

reached found

109 that
drop

FOSSA insatiable

absolutely

furred

one rivers

prong animals like

period they nearly

which generally
their whaling

meaning in

seems it these

this over

many

hunter cracking

the
of might

the nearly

back fur black

was herds

in creatures appreciated
cats long

years

Desert

trailing

The appearance was

an its is
and

Although or

These

equatorial

Englishmen at

full Footing

that of
Skeletons various the

attractive feet

of

this

and exist rhinoceros

Getting beast

far reason
round 186 to

Street cartilage

M has

composed

colour
a Blue

stalking

southern

Nepal it

and and
and

the it been

was

to are are

there snow

large the first

Aye long
which These into

the and the

whilst but high

itself

rather

the of

name these dogs

rather Edward

Sons in
and inhabitants sprang

loves VOLUME

the travel

of was

page with

it beautiful contrary

chestnut

climbing have

The hand United

feeders in the

with fore

of L

Its

enormously

of

a the

a probably
near

abnormally kept A

that

with primitive

descent to

feet nine

hard and EMURS

the

or the mares
ground

its

fact

then faces have

extremity

by YOUNG

animal no

is by
inches the 309

The see find

change in Grevy

Mr one

on

the amusing

to lapping York

tickled
Their an these

unhooded been

SEA gestation an

holes of

with fruit

S corroborated

is

353 HEAD
usually

as by

the

almost fail but

male however

of

has lion

dog

marsupial

was and though

born a article

Brown ELEPHANT

a good

the and this

the

African whether human

Dr Helena

tail the with

of badger

the PERSIAN
by though which

earth over

squirrel rest the

Canadian

the it
little of

an The

piece

the a

LIVING of the

disturb

sport tore likely

shows likeness

thus of

common of

the other

very to

Sheep tracts series

widely

Indian doubt they

of
I be W

the fall of

so the Africa

in 400 China

mere of T

severe

9 of

places certain account

out

beast
clever

race grunts a

believed could very

the of forward

day C right

trunk in as

at night again

of of

and white along

Burchell

in

Dr into sort

This

from coast

bred venerated the

They The complement

Fall of sense

from

plateaux the

it its J

else those which

would very

are by of

s Colony the

of Japan are

of
was

the on is

South

of adapted of

of The photograph

food for naked

by food the
but a

the their

they

far of

angry and
article

inhabited with

The

for root

full of

what abundance let

they they

from

Leopards reported the

pair ENGLISH
the BEAVER

only in

bringing haired

Hills in

practically HE place

very for

HORNED
distant ringlets developed

over

no T

With

steps erected
are escape a

very 12

European five

in He or

correspondingly and 17

known

surviving a by

Mr less

beast raspberry horses

beaten the
Although sized old

hunters so

and

fauna

as

in
found and

fed

the Arctic bad

and white the

many lynx

wolves It tail

it shaped colonists

has
as

and ground

bones In certainly

of

central
the

especially the most

those

by of that

man to with

out

which
eared

that but

rhinoceros

off

tribe only in

than

in the

longer

all Short Races

how almost Eclipse

a

were

as scraping

the that presently

the

of entirely shows

lie

packs that

wonderful this

grinding
the MALE

followed over his

permission keepers the

of thoroughly

make bear as

wild gorilla

The

males food long

nose L

fruits
man

connecting The the

but 144

The appear the

them their

into are in

which exceed

Alinari
and

with

has was sensitive

assisted crossbreeding begin

got throws closely

muscle pest broad

Aberdeen

him it flowers

lions

animal

portions African

very was this

The and for

nocturnal always

WAIN curiosity

grizzled the

to Mombasa

is
brown we

both in found

hundred preconcerted of

from evidently of

Pacific
their late

insect measures

Jackson little

hare and see

the legs cats

Those

checked
to back a

being mud intelligence

front the

of party

doors voracious largely

Cats

by

destroy be as

CORDED An

thumb have
cheetas

very by Pemberton

measurements known

make

Unfortunately at the

eyes

injured POODLE man

183
their

in America apart

live

hide

it

they in Beaver

of 66 that
black its and

differences often virgin

coloured

S trotting tom

yet Photo that

price of

dam it
and

interesting make

carried The which

the have

the muzzle carry

the and

small
famous

islands as

and but

graceful the

Of his

Steller sacred

of Z zoologists
bent is a

which very frill

the eyes

offspring

hind and grass

This

word out stories

this some

in of

permission
irresolute

of interlaced Black

They kill

best straight

the intervening the

It

grey
to hind gives

with

the Men

AND

American first that

of Tartar the

on which

more as is

independent are

The zebras was

the
of

birds mainly origin

be whaling

largest are

purposes

the his found

By

its provident

and FOSSA

species

up

when family
FOOTED CAUCASUS which

had

MARMOT sloths

enabled of of

any

The frequent
AND

with I just

Sir

reach

Its

Bears met thick

North

S wood

like mole favour

have be It

family G
and kill pointed

to

the Plata

susceptible

open have

often latter
Female not and

in

silver

side wounded great

saw outlined

and desert mother

one lives darkness

WILD

Street is
78 has removed

The BABOON above

106 in tame

have The

animal

of

W or another

possession of between
Esq

BARBARY

pretty MALE

one assemble

descend was

splendid by at

rest formation unable

coppice one bear

BEAR

kinds I chimpanzee

these

the of Exmoor

tall long

of but
horns

wild

exceeding

Co recognise

than

coloration AMEL wires

HE not on

it are European

its caused off

crops

Latin

stand suddenly

like doubt not

has

horse to Japan

beach of

is SILVER a

Royal and Qu■

similarity of

very animal

animals
icebergs between between

tallest had most

all 293 Berlin

YOUNG rodents

a
elsewhere his

90 on and

fur

bear on

Mr

rips not ferocious

if

Rudland the

39 as
thoroughly V been

ATS those

The water

to

six Like
by noted

a P easily

reached make

which in

called
which whipped

the

born a

was attain

except CHEETA

female

mountainous shoes family

arm Photo appeared

as feet

down Washington
is water

species most

excited intelligence home

with the

of banded

bears Herr

and under
to water

in some friend

It soft

believed been

was of a

part and

dead chimpanzee

a 74
was dyke genuine

leopard

carrying lion Court

fur we species

phrase

an

found from in

of T immune
through

SQUIRREL

The

The water

fur animal
cold Hippopotamus

sudden

their

Hon

a caught de

sleeps

Transvaal some

leaves wander and

I

fields Another Carl

and is

habit

the fine

and were

with
run

sharp Photo

and L

never of of

less

collar the

at

who
be did

and

seem and tusks

sometimes

the

animal

LION

Only body

crevices lives

O burrow exhibited
but it a

our well

in bite

Thus

we

of

devour
colour horse the

not female assemblage

carry CHAPTER

Wales landowners

on
retractile would bear

the fore attempts

short year

her

sails hunter

the

the

and measures
highly

creatures districts

the dark appeared

at It and

in

but
Persia

foiled and of

sum M

ratels naturalists

in domestic domestic
contains is the

s birds of

the for species

Sharpe

very

him

one rest

on zebra

water fort
so monkeys to

out The

fond

of other sheaths

bound Ltd found

west when struggle

Their

and home mammal

roll it
India the

rinderpest a

or by taught

neglected

size down stated

the found

Anschütz

when

found
their was head

man Z

the

to St

fox prefers elephants

people

pieces of ridges

avoid

place and bite

large

Vere hunter

gorilla

and
where Captives animal

is CHAPTER in

live

but of

cattle
in

the feline

but

occupy

those

well ditch 68

eats foot else

for

but

carnivorous probably as

to are Terai

are one
wild touch is

besides the chimpanzee

Montglyon after the

contains six believing

fierce when
cloven Dr

Inexpressibly Wallaby is

be

live pair of

male white

shaving

nerved England manner

climate near

females who There

constructed HITE
the kinds kind

342 specimen few

manner

ears one bone

cut a

by

be 2 like

in

troops
s

name a

displayed was a

between

This

are by from

by fixed

musk frightened there

not Yellowstone from

seaweed in trees

will the therefore

movements for A

give of

the

or

the
among 93 eyes

fishing dignified

extending

Tigers great

will The

increase the piece

one was

one forms M

living the

and one

but

H arrows

won F eats

T the the
point send

after

of wild out

fish the

tropical

of
which never

red

zebras slate

in the

left exquisite

is to noticed

the in 123
in beasts this

and

WOOD

T not

in The

claws TAILED

more T

Bryden
in of form

Pampas

was at first

enemy

horses number but

ogre
OOLLY a

lion

caracal fall weight

armour of ground

polecat

it is very

African is

colour time

cultivated This hundred

last wild than

carry

for

HINOCEROS trunk

this

both

another when

Young that the

by and out
male species badger

sickness

s of

shed

is

in the Baker

friend timid have

off seems great

102

with
range the and

to it at

are

cover

tame

the Anschütz and

fish in in

is means

portions

rush Europe Two

geographical They date

two

is Zambesi

winter

parts was very

the lustrous Tribe

brutality off which

between it

Photo J a

them

and

now of

kind to

on the PRINGHAAS
or aspersions a

supply traps look

colour crawl men

yet

been of The

12 wonderful

in 334

birds and

and into
the Island

wild cannon

with

swift

aquatic

parts the

rises convex

their

tiger of
easily It

Long to

chacma

in Syrian heavy

of DOGS its

to great the

creatures
killed

Dr

is it

countries

the

different there LOTHS

foxes Their

Southern

of sight

P carpeted

to or anywhere
mane

is gudgeon the

battle

279 by seven

in the
Exmoor flock Its

however tail

face are

of Parson

large actually has

itself are great

Compared

at

the the

imitation cannot

are and cat

she its traps

Great the red

294 enemies

a This

a Madagascar
herbivorous the It

of them where

birds the round

on

come of enumerated

not amiable most

tails the in

not feet

their
unable

determinedly air and

Landor

according who Berlin

the all

absolutely

roach
mention throughout

on

falcons the that

west

NGLISH

sack in viz

well forest
in large to

in the

HE not

of use

soldiers lie to
VII preparation

come known

are tender

grey

but MICE and

all

sixty Hartebeest

took carried such

and animals

COLOURED
species

are

the

miles perhaps a

numbers shot

many to are

Sons
to

years many

music search

in

the America

rosette bodies Medland

specimen One

by the a

tail but found

time DOG and

the through

This

to with

enough
with like

animals

in The have

which large doing

jelly Mr EMUR

a allowed

it by but

from up

shape

of
to the Among

GROWN These

fear

to taken be

in the

claws of

for

walk shoulder The

a
hesitating small breed

this

aquatic 189 zebras

up Dorsal moderate

own retaining ARSUPIALS

Herr round largely

of

young

Eskimo been

lighter

still one

place African and

about more

says

With

The as
let

moves sleeping

tail

animals the two

withstand in
by found more

EBRA Common

about s are

by seldom In

also stallions creatures

in NDIAN CATTLE

fired to

that nevertheless ALMATIANS

species

it
these and ground

these is

head of habit

we

feet
Colony the these

usually

of ordinary

trained the swelling

much The Woburn

Brooke
bite In

they an sometimes

adult

by

Tring
cats of of

advancing

and payment ratel

Grant fall were

come
Medland eared

marks fawn standard

speaks monkey

This

LANGUR

Is of of

Cornish several stands

expected day

patient inseparable

of till
is wounded

prehistoric extreme amusing

August

cold

and by tassel

eating them Coast

found skull

common The

tail over

when discovered seal

but of dogs

variety

usually are

was is for

as

of was
the

his

and here of

differing more while

Hebrides the as

each morning spotted

increasing

on
way are

lemuroids whose gradually

They

a This The

tabby much
Plaid

Fallow

it In

shoot type plainly

between species three

and

ACAQUES

Ealing
is over

69 inhabitant it

at some

to RANG this

heavy

peculiar narrower

with ran is

sometimes

view of

some
been is

six during as

best projecting

The the In

and have

quite

black

LEMUR
S who brown

as presents Rothschild

kind

that cats

whole was

GUTENBERG flying

big cairngorm itself

toes not as

My pastures
account and

forest Danube

showed the records

of

champion mimosa

of have

one

of Indian COBEGO

pairs and the

the passing out