June 22, 2023 • 47 mins
Behind the cozy wholesome sweetness of the Little House books, is a raging mother and daughter relationship that is the stuff of soap operas and tabloid talk shows. Laura Ingalls Wilder and her husband Almanzo had one living child named Rose. That child would go on to be Rose Wilder Lane – one of the most successful, and controversial, freelance writers in the early 20th century. Without her, the Little House books would never have been written. It was also Rose, the world famous writer, scared of being eclipsed by her mothers success, who, overcome with jealousy and resentment, almost derailed the entire Little House series before it even got started. In the first part of this two part episode, we’re going to meet Rose Wilder Lane. Where did she come from? What was her life like? How did she become her mother’s greatest collaborator, and under-miner?
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Rose had no magic and she knew it.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Rose was a hack, but a lot of hacks are
really successful.
Speaker 3 (00:08):
She was a complicated lady.
Speaker 4 (00:11):
My friend Rose is very divisive. You either love her
or you don't like her at all.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
I find her just so despicable.
Speaker 5 (00:18):
Most of my personal reaction is to feel sorry for Laura.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
I'm like, man, this was her companion.
Speaker 3 (00:23):
She was a bit rhemian, and she just didn't think
like everybody else did. She's just a kind of louvishly
talented but incredibly frustrating personality.
Speaker 6 (00:36):
It is amazing the bad mouthing that goes on fifty
years after her death. I am so disgusted with that,
because I think Rose was a heroic woman.
Speaker 7 (00:51):
Laura Engels Wilder and her husband Almonzo had one living
child named Rose. If you only know Rose from the
Little House in the Perry Books, you don't know much.
In the first decades of the twentieth century, Rose Wilder
Lane was one of the most successful and controversial freelance
writers in the country.
Speaker 5 (01:10):
Rose was such a famous writer in her time. She
was so popular.
Speaker 7 (01:15):
Rose is the reason Laura, a middle aged farm wife,
picked up a pen and started writing about eggs Rose
told her to well.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
They'd had a symbiotic relationship related to writing for many,
many years. Rose would write her mother and suggest stories
that she should work up for the Missouri Ruralist or
some other Kansas or Missouri newspaper.
Speaker 7 (01:42):
Rose was also the one who encouraged her mother to
do more than write articles about farm life. Rose pushed
Laura to write the Little Housebooks and was integral to
the process.
Speaker 3 (01:53):
She was wrapped up so closely in pushing her mother
to do this riting, in editing and revising and getting
the books published. She has just woven into the whole
story in ways that you cannot ignore.
Speaker 7 (02:13):
And it was Rose, the world famous writer, scared of
being eclipsed by her mother's success, who overcome with jealousy
and resentment, almost derailed the entire Little House series before
it even got started. Behind the cozy, wholesome sweetness of
the Little House Books is a raging mother and daughter
(02:36):
relationship that is the stuff of soap operas and tabloid
talk shows.
Speaker 3 (02:41):
I mean, people in Mansfield still there's still memories about
this hanging around in Mansfield history. That's how big a
deal it was.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
But how did it get to this point.
Speaker 7 (02:54):
As far as Little House readers know, Rose only appears
in the First four Years, last and least well known
of the books. As the title suggests, the First four
Years covers Laura's first four years of marriage twelve monso
Rose arrives in the second year, a happy and healthy baby.
She's named after the prairie roses Laura loves so much.
(03:17):
A Rose in December was much rarer than a Rose
in June. Christmas was at hand, and Rose was a
grand present. It's a sweet, loving description that comes in
the middle of a very odd, off putting book. Unlike
the rest of the Little House series, the First four
Years is not an enjoyable read.
Speaker 4 (03:38):
Yeah, it is.
Speaker 3 (03:38):
Jarring, and I remember that same feeling reading it as
a kid, like what is this? Where did this come from?
Speaker 7 (03:45):
It's jarring because the First four Years is an unedited manuscript.
It was never meant to see the light of day.
It was nevertheless published after both Laura and Rose had died.
And yet the First four Years might be the most
pivotal book in the Little House series, written by Laura
in the aftermath of an epic implosion in Laura and
(04:06):
Rose's relationship. It eventually launched a decades long conspiracy theory
over the authorship of the Little House books. If you
look at all the available information, and you look at
Laura's writing, and you look at Rose wilder Lane's writing,
Rose wilder Lane wrote the books. Rose is woven into
the Little House creation story in ways you can't ignore.
(04:29):
However you feel about her, there's no question that more
than Laura's editors, more than Garth Williams, who later illustrated
the books, Rose is responsible for the Little House series.
But who was she really? In the first part of
this two part episode, we're going to meet Rose wilder Lane.
(04:50):
Where did she come from? What was her life like?
How did she become her mother's greatest collaborator and underminer?
Buckle up, I'm Glennis McNichol, and this is part one
of Rose wilder Lane. The thing about Rose wilder Lane
(05:53):
is her life story is the stuff of Hollywood, and
the fact she hasn't been given the Hollywood treatment is
a bit strange when you consider how much Hollywood Love's adventure,
drama and scandal like any classic American tale of Rose
had humble small town beginning the Ingles home.
Speaker 8 (06:13):
Everyone, this is the last house built by Charles Ingles.
Speaker 9 (06:17):
He built this house.
Speaker 8 (06:18):
In eighteen eighty seven and the family moved in on
Christmas Eve.
Speaker 7 (06:22):
Emily and Iron De Smet, South Dakota, a tiny town
on the eastern side of the state, surrounded by rolling farmland.
Dasmet is the setting of the last five Little House books,
and we're touring the Ingles home. It's a beautiful two
story house not far from De Smet's main street. At
some point it was inhabited by all of the Ingles
(06:43):
except for Laura, who was already married to Almonzo by
the time Charles built this house.
Speaker 8 (06:47):
This is a photograph of Laura had al Manzo shortly
after they were married in eighteen eighty five. They had
their daughter Rose on December fifth of eighteen eighty six,
and then their luck kind.
Speaker 1 (06:58):
Of ran out for a little while.
Speaker 7 (07:00):
It was during this difficult time for the Wilders that
Rose lived here in this house.
Speaker 8 (07:04):
Amanda Laura coughed diphtheria, which was a very common disease
at the time. While they were recovering their daughter, Rose
stayed here with her grandparents, and the original bedroom upstairs
became Rose's room.
Speaker 7 (07:16):
Despite the short time she spent here Rose featured prominently
in our tour. Even from stories about her as a baby,
evidence of her strong personality is present.
Speaker 4 (07:27):
This is a photograph of Rose when she was young.
Speaker 8 (07:30):
If you look closely, you'll see that she's wearing a
ring in this photograph.
Speaker 4 (07:35):
The photographer did not want her to.
Speaker 8 (07:37):
Be wearing this ring, so whenever he would pose her
for her portrait, he would have her hand cover up
the ring, But whenever he would go behind the sheet
to take the photo, she would always switch her hands back.
Speaker 9 (07:49):
Even as a child, she.
Speaker 4 (07:50):
Was very strong willed and independent.
Speaker 8 (07:53):
She grew up in to be quite the strong willed,
independent adult.
Speaker 7 (07:59):
Because so little known about Rose outside her minimal presence
in the books, the truth of Rose's early years can
come as quite a shock to readers who only know
her as the sweet baby Laura wrote about. But Rose
was a force of nature and her story is at
least as wild as Laura's, if not more so. I
talked Joe through her basic bio.
Speaker 4 (08:20):
Well walk me through, just walk me through her early
childhood and her life, And just like wrote, I want
to hear about Rose before she became Rose.
Speaker 3 (08:31):
Right.
Speaker 7 (08:33):
So, she was born in eighteen eighty six, in Dismet,
South Dakota, which we've been to because that's where Laura lived.
Laura was only nineteen when she got pregnant. They'd only
been married. Her and Almonzo had seven babies babies having babies,
Her and Almondo had only been married for one year.
Shortly after Rose was born, Laura Almonzo get diphtheria. Almonzo
(08:56):
has a stroke. He's partially paralyzed. Their crops fail, they
lose their house, they lose all their money.
Speaker 5 (09:03):
Laura has a.
Speaker 7 (09:04):
Baby boy who dies a few weeks after birth. Their
house burns down. Like it's a very traumatic early childhood.
They were very poor, right poor. They're so poor that
for her whole life, Rose had terrible teeth. She was
very resentful of that. She's a very very smart kid,
like she's very smart from a young age. And right
(09:27):
around the age of eight, they see an advertisement for
the Ozarks, the Land of Apples, and they decide to
move to the Ozarks. So they take the you know,
they go to the Ozarks with one one hundred dollars bill.
They get to the Ozarks and buy this land. But
it's called Rocky Ridge because it's full of rocks, and
(09:48):
it takes years to clear and years to be self sufficient.
They're deeply, deeply poor. Rose is dressed in I wouldn't
say rags, but she's not dressed well, and she's so
aware of this when she she goes to school, the
class discrepancy of how smart she is and how poor
she looks. And sometime in high school she's so advanced
(10:10):
that her mother sends her off to live with Eliza Jane,
Almonzo's sister. As much as Rose hated Mansfield and resented
her mother and adored her father, she always wanted to
leave Mansfield. She could never help. She was always coming back.
She was always coming home. She went to high school
with Eliza Jane comes back. But there's some sense, and
(10:33):
of course these things are hard to gauge, but there
is some sense in Caroline Fraser's book that Rose may
have been I mean, I'm using loaded words here, but
these are the words that I think would have been
attached to her at the time. She was like perhaps
a little promiscuous, that she, you know, liked boys and
was maybe a little risky for I mean, my god,
(10:57):
can you imagine what small town Ozarks would like fun
Rose and Laura had an extremely fraught relationship from very
early on because as a mother, I imagine there's a lot
of guilt in not being able to provide your daughter
with certain things or not knowing how to handle her.
Speaker 5 (11:15):
And Laura was a teen mom. They're so poor.
Speaker 7 (11:20):
She's got a husband with a disability, Laura's been working
since the age of nine, and she has a daughter
who is a lot to handle. So we know from
Laura writing about herself that she had a temper. She
was very candid about that when she wrote about her
childhood in the Little House series, and she was headstrong,
and I think you see that in Rose. You see
(11:42):
that sort of aggressiveness in the controlling nature. Caroline Fraser's
book Prairie Fires, she writes extensively about Rose, and Caroline writes,
you know, yes, Laura had a temper, but Laura was
willing to acknowledge that temper. But Laura was able to
recognize her laws and Rose seemed unable.
Speaker 4 (12:04):
Yeah, I imagine them butting heads. Right. You have these
two strong, ambitious, smart, ahead of their time women who
you know, I could already see it happening with my
own daughter, Like when you have these two strong personalities.
I think it becomes very difficult.
Speaker 7 (12:22):
Rose, which I think we can both relate to, got
the hell out of Mansfield, Missouri as soon as she could.
She met a man called je Lette Lane, Like, this
is the least surprising thing. A man named je Let Lane.
He's a confidence man, which man is a con man.
They were married for technically they were married for a while,
(12:44):
and they had a tumultuous marriage. They were, you know itinerant,
always trying to pull together con scam might be probably
cons funds, Yeah, probably cons. And Rose became pregnant and
then had a still birth, and a very very difficult
still birth that made it impossible for her to have
(13:06):
children after that, and was ill for quite some like
in the hospital for quite a long time, and eventually
their marriage falls apart. She goes to San Francisco on
her own and read about nineteen fifteen.
Speaker 4 (13:23):
Not how old was she then?
Speaker 7 (13:24):
She would have been in nineteen fifteen, she would have
been almost thirty. She falls for divorce, which in nineteen fifteen,
even in San Francisco, is scandalous.
Speaker 1 (13:35):
Not a small thing.
Speaker 7 (13:36):
Yeah, And right around this time, you know, Rose is
alone in San Francisco and she writes Laura this incredibly
endearing letter and asking Laura to come to San Francisco
and visit her. She says, dearest Mama Bess, which is
what she called Laura her whole life, because Almonzo called
(13:57):
Laura Bess, and so the fact that Rose includes her
first name sort of is like she sees her mother
as a bit of a contemporary, even from a young age.
But dearest Mama Bess, I simply can't stand being so
homesick for you anymore. You must plan to come out
here in July or at latest August. You've simply all
cap got to. I can send you five dollars a
(14:19):
week to make up for what you will lose in chickens,
et cetera.
Speaker 1 (14:22):
By the trip.
Speaker 4 (14:23):
I think that's sweet.
Speaker 1 (14:24):
It is sweet.
Speaker 7 (14:25):
And also knowing that in so many of Rose's journals
she wrote with deep resentment over giving her parents money.
It's like she is internally conflicted about how much she
loves and needs them, like her mother, particularly like they're
so intertwined they cannot separate from each other even in
their worst moments. Their lives are so connected and they
(14:49):
need each other so badly. Anyway, Roses in San Francisco,
she gets divorced, she gets a job at the San
Francisco Bulletin as a secretary, but then her talents are
noticed almost immediately, and she gets moved up into an
editor position. And then she gets moved up into a
reporter position and starts going out and reporting stories.
Speaker 4 (15:11):
Wow, that's amazing, Yeah yeah yeah wow. So what kind
of newspaper was that? Was that, say, the New York
Times or the New York Post.
Speaker 7 (15:24):
Well, this is still the heyday of yellow journalism, right,
and many newspapers at that time encouraged a degree of
salaciousness and exaggeration.
Speaker 4 (15:34):
Scandal and scandal cells.
Speaker 7 (15:36):
Scandal, And you know, into this world arrives Rose, who
it turns out, has an enormous talent for taking a
kernel of truth and turning it into a fantastic tale that.
Speaker 4 (15:50):
Is maybe or maybe not true.
Speaker 5 (15:53):
Right, Like, there's a.
Speaker 7 (15:54):
Very tenuous connection and she was really really good at it.
And again it's easy in hindsight to be like, oh,
that's very shoddy journalism. But having survived both of us
on the blogosphere and entabloid papers in your case, it's
like she's a single woman supporting herself in a city.
Speaker 4 (16:13):
That's not easy, not an easy city.
Speaker 7 (16:16):
No, and she's supporting two aging parents who are financially unstable.
You know, in Missouri, it's like, if you're good at this.
Speaker 4 (16:26):
Lean in, lean in. And she leaned right, she leaned, and.
Speaker 1 (16:30):
She was very good. You know, she's so good at that.
Speaker 7 (16:33):
She immediately starts pitching these biographies of you know, Herbert Hoover,
who is a politician, then and Charlie Chaplin and Jack London,
and pitches them to publishing houses and to their relatives
and in one case to Charlie Chaplin himself.
Speaker 1 (16:48):
I think, as like.
Speaker 7 (16:50):
Highly researched, respectable biographies, and they participated. And then these
so called biographies get published and they are less by biographies,
then fantastical tales with one or two facts in them
and a number I think Jack London's widow sued her,
(17:11):
Charlie Chaplin tried to sue her. Herbert Hoover was like,
wanted to distance himself from her, He wanted nothing to
do with her. Henry Ford's widow was furious. But the
thing about all that that stands out to me is
that she was not apologetic. It's not like she was like, oh,
you caught me. She was like, what are you talking about?
I wrote a great book. It makes you look fantastic.
Speaker 4 (17:31):
She sounds amazing to me. I stand by my earlier statement.
I think Rose sounds like a lot of fun.
Speaker 9 (17:36):
She also sounds like she could have worked at Cocker.
All of the things she's doing again feel very relatable
and very modern, and she was very good at it.
Speaker 7 (17:46):
And she is definitely making questionable decisions. But by the
early twenties, she's making bank They paid so highly, and
she was so good at these. She moved into short
story writing, which in the twenty for magazines was very profitable.
She started traveling, like she traveled to Albania, She hiked
the mountains by herself. She was all over Europe after
(18:09):
the war. She was in Paris in the nineteen twenties
with that crowd.
Speaker 4 (18:14):
Yeah, yeah, good Paris. Time, good Paris.
Speaker 7 (18:17):
She was in her forties, and she apparently she apparently
attended an orgy as an observer. We don't think she participated,
but again.
Speaker 1 (18:27):
Who knows.
Speaker 4 (18:28):
We don't know, We don't know.
Speaker 7 (18:30):
Again, our sense of this too, Caroline Fraser writes, like
our sense of her in these time periods are sometimes
coming from her sort of colleagues, many of whom are
not nice about her. And we both know writing about
women who strong personalities is a very tenuous business.
Speaker 4 (18:47):
History is not kind to strong women.
Speaker 7 (18:48):
But colleagues are not kind to strong women like no,
And again, Rose was a very difficult person, and she
had very questionable views on a number of issues. You know,
in hindsight, we see her as this incredibly adventurous, talented
woman who's traveling around Europe, you know, after the war.
(19:11):
She's in Albania, she's hiking in the mountains by herself,
and she's in Paris and it's so enviable. But Rose
herself was so ashamed of the poverty that she'd been
raised in, and it was something she carried with her
her whole life, which is, I think, something to remember,
like these things from childhood that we carry don't just
go away.
Speaker 1 (19:32):
And she wrote in her journal like Rose is.
Speaker 7 (19:34):
A big diary keeper, which is how we know a
lot of this, right, We know a lot of this
from Rose's own diary, so you have to sort of
read it, read between the lines.
Speaker 1 (19:41):
From time to time.
Speaker 7 (19:42):
She's not the most reliable narrator, as we've established, but
she She wrote in her diary in the late twenties
and said, I would change places with any young woman
with intelligent, simple, harmonious parents, good health, and a cultured background.
And I mean, we know this, but we all know
(20:03):
from social media that you're drawn to the depiction of
the thing you feel you don't have. And it's so
clear that Rose desperately wanted to not have come from poverty,
to have been better educated, to have had parents who
she felt should have been more loving to her.
Speaker 4 (20:23):
I feel that really hard, though, because I grew up
with parents who were both a hot mess, and all
I wanted growing up was stability. And so that line
that she writes and the guest, I would have traded
with any girl who had a stable home and who
had the things that I didn't have. And I think
(20:43):
that it made me a massive striver as an.
Speaker 5 (20:46):
Adult and someone who has a great deal of stability.
Speaker 4 (20:50):
Now you exactly, yeah, Yeah, who built stability because I
did not have it as a child.
Speaker 7 (20:57):
Rose definitely craves stability throughout her life, and for a
long time she had the funds to achieve it, but
at every turn Rose managed to undermine herself, making an
endless series of bad financial decisions just when she got
closest to getting the thing she wanted. But nothing would
compare to what Rose did when she returned to Mansfield,
Missouri in the late nineteen twenties. Rosa spent her entire
(21:20):
life trying to get away from Rocky Ridge, and now
she was back, and the first thing she did was
use her money to build her parents a new house,
a house that neither Laura or Almonza wanted or needed.
This house would become the setting of the most explosive,
damaging decision Rose ever made, one her mother Laura never
(21:43):
got over.
Speaker 10 (21:50):
I think it's this.
Speaker 11 (21:53):
Wilder rock house nine hundred.
Speaker 7 (21:56):
Feet remember Laura's house Rocky Ridge in Mansfield, Missouri, are
designed to her own specifications, right down to the height
of the kitchen counter.
Speaker 1 (22:05):
Well up the hill, there's another house, the Rock House.
I love this house.
Speaker 4 (22:16):
I don't want to live in this house.
Speaker 1 (22:19):
These windows.
Speaker 2 (22:20):
Rose built this as a little, uh retiredment home before
her parents.
Speaker 7 (22:25):
The Rock House cost eleven thousand dollars to build, close
to two hundred thousand dollars in today's money, and became
a metaphor for Rose's relationship with her parents. After childhood
of severe poverty. Rose wanted them to have something beautiful
and expensive, proof of her success and value in the world.
Speaker 10 (22:45):
To me, it looks like such a glamorous house, these
Florida ceiling windows and the armed doors and the casement windows.
Speaker 4 (22:51):
It's so.
Speaker 1 (22:53):
Like it could be in a Hollywood film.
Speaker 7 (22:55):
No expense was spared, and was there electricity in the house?
Speaker 4 (22:59):
Yes?
Speaker 2 (23:00):
Rose brought down the electricity at her own expense.
Speaker 10 (23:04):
From what I recall, I don't think very many houses
in this part of the state had access to electricity.
Speaker 1 (23:10):
Is that now.
Speaker 2 (23:12):
Most of them didn't get electricity until the forties. But
and it cost her three thousand dollars, which in those
days is my way.
Speaker 7 (23:22):
For those wondering, three thousand dollars in nineteen twenty eight
is the equivalent of fifty three thousand dollars in today's money.
So Rose built her dream house, insisting it was also
her parents' dream house and the best thing for them.
But neither Laura nor Almonzo particularly wanted to live there.
(23:43):
They had built Rocky Ridge to their own specifications. Still,
Rose was a big personality, and Laura and Almonzo could
never seem to say no to her. So up the
hill they went to live in the Rock House and
down into Rocky Ridge, a place she'd spent most of
life trying to escape. Went Rose. Then the market crashed.
(24:06):
This hit the Wilder family hard. Rose lost all of
her money and all of Laura's money that she'd invested
for them.
Speaker 11 (24:15):
It was a.
Speaker 7 (24:16):
Brutal loss and through the family back into the financial
chaos and insecurity they'd spent their entire lives trying to
climb out of.
Speaker 6 (24:24):
In nineteen thirty one, their brokerage firm collapsed.
Speaker 1 (24:29):
This is Bill Anderson. He's written aboutlawa extensively.
Speaker 6 (24:33):
Rose had encouraged her folks to invest, and she was
heavily invested. And that's when they really were faced with
what are we going to do now? Financially?
Speaker 1 (24:46):
Rose is a single woman.
Speaker 7 (24:48):
Even before the Rock House, she'd been helping her parents
out financially for a long time. Now, in addition to
herself and her parents, there were two houses and no money.
Add to this the guilt she felt over losing her parents' money,
and it was all too much. Throughout her life, Rose
had suffered bouts of depression. We know from Rose's diaries
(25:11):
that she often escaped gooted Laura for everything that was
wrong in her life. In one entry that was typical
of this resentment, Rose wrote, it is amazing how my
mother can make me suffer. How she hates it that
I'm her sole source of support, Implicit in every syllable
and tone, the fact that I've failed, fallen down on
(25:32):
the job, been the broken read. The picture Rose pains
of herself in her journals is that of a woman
who runs on martyrdom and bitterness, and is incapable of
accepting any love shown to her by Laura. The curious
thing is that she's sincerely reaching for some kind of
companionship with me. She's trying to be friends. She wants
(25:56):
genuine warmth, sympathy. She has not the faint notion of
what she's doing to me, But underneath there's not a
trace of generosity in her. For most of her adult life,
Rose had insisted on supplementing her parents' finances and resented it.
But in the aftermath of the financial crash, it was
(26:17):
Rose who was completely overcome, And it was at this
moment that Laura, a person who'd been through many severe
ups and downs in her life, sat down and wrote
her memoir Pioneer Girl. You will remember from our last
episode about the writing of the Little House Books that
Laura initially wrote her memoir Pioneer Girl for adults, but
(26:38):
that when Rose took it to her publishing contexts, it
didn't sell. Rose then reworked it as a young children's story,
and that did get some attention, and then Laura and
Rose took that and reworked it into Little House in
the Big Woods, and boom. Laura's editor called the result
a book No Depression Can Stop. While that was happening,
(27:00):
Rose was writing too, working on something that she hoped
might be a bestseller all her own, well.
Speaker 1 (27:08):
Sort of her own.
Speaker 7 (27:10):
Here's where things get absolutely insane.
Speaker 1 (27:15):
Here's what happens.
Speaker 7 (27:17):
Laura sells A Little House in the Big Woods in
nineteen thirty two to great excitement. She works with Rose
on Edits for Big Woods to ready it for publication.
At the same time Rose is helping Laura, she is
also secretly writing a novel tw to let, The Hurricane Roar,
which she sells to the Saturday Evening post Let. The
(27:38):
Hurricane Roar is about a couple, Charles and Caroline. They
are homesteaders in South Dakota who live in a dugout
on wild Plum Creek. Charles plays the violin, They have
a baby, Their crops are destroyed by grasshoppers. Charles has
to walk hundreds of miles east to find work. Caroline
(28:00):
survives a blizzard alone in the house. Does any of
this sound familiar? Laura's parents' names are Charles and Caroline.
Laura lived in a dugout on Plum Creek. Hurricane is
basically a mesh of stories from Laura's own childhood, which
Rose knew Laura intended to utilize in future books, mixed
(28:20):
with facts from Laura's early marriage to alm Monzo.
Speaker 1 (28:24):
No really.
Speaker 7 (28:26):
At the same time Laura was celebrating the publication of
Big Woods, Rose wrote a novel based on her mother's
life and sold that under her own name to The
Saturday Evening Post, which serialized it. The crazier thing is
that Rose may have done it without her mother's permission
or even Laura's knowledge.
Speaker 11 (28:48):
We cannot know with one hundred percent accuracy if Rose
wilder Lane wrote Let the Hurricane Warren's Secret, but it
looks very very likely that she did, and I actually
think it was a little bit more insidious than that.
Speaker 7 (29:04):
Up until nineteen thirty two, Rose had never shown any
interest in writing about the pioneer life. She'd been asked
to you by various editors, but had never been excited
by the idea until she and her mother tried to
sell Pioneer Girl to the Saturday Evening Post. As you'll remember,
Rose told her mother that Pioneer Girl was rejected, but
(29:26):
that might not have been the whole truth. Apparently, after
turning it down, the Saturday Evening Post may have reconsidered.
Speaker 11 (29:34):
Lane's literary agent got back in touch with her and said, Hey,
I've heard from the Saturday Evening Post and they are
interested in a nonfiction serial about the Pioneer days and
they wanted me to get in touch with you, but
now they're interested in Pioneer Girl. Apparently Lane never told
her mother that, and so you know, Saturday Evening Post ultimately,
(29:58):
of course, bought Let the Hurricane Roar. It was published
in the fall of nineteen thirty two, and then shortly
after the book was published, Lane left Rocky Rich Farm
on an extended trip back east.
Speaker 12 (30:12):
I want to get this straight, so let me recap
for a second. After Little House in the Big Woods.
Rose started writing her own novel, which was a fictionalized
version of her parents, Laura and al Manzo's marriage, but
she changed the names to Laura's parents, Charles and Caroline,
(30:33):
and she did this all without telling her mom she
was doing it.
Speaker 7 (30:38):
Yes, I'm nodding my head emphatically, like we're on a
talk show right now and you're Oprah and we're like
what the whole audience is like, what, Like, doesn't it
feel like we're on some crazy talk show?
Speaker 4 (30:50):
It feels more Jerry Springer tonight.
Speaker 1 (30:52):
It totally feels Jerry.
Speaker 5 (30:54):
This is a Jerry Springer episode.
Speaker 7 (30:56):
Imagine doing that to your mother. So like Rose is
simultaneously spends her life trying to get away from Mansfield
and her mother, and yet spends her life also writing
about her mother or like stealing her mother's stories. It
is a Jerry Springer show.
Speaker 4 (31:16):
It is, And her mother didn't even know.
Speaker 5 (31:19):
Yeah, like crazy.
Speaker 7 (31:22):
Eventually Laura did find out, and she didn't take the
news well. According to Laura's biographer Caroline Fraser, Laura found
out about the deception dring a get together in her
own home with Rose present when Rose's friend, not knowing
it was a secret brought out copies of the advanced
advertisements for Hurricane. The advertisements were illustrations of Charles and Caroline,
(31:50):
Laura's beloved parents, as dashing Hollywood esque figures, gazing into
the future, as if they had been cast in some
larger than life screen epic romance. Laura was stunned and confused.
According to Rose's own journals, Laura wanted to know why
her parents were in Dakota as a young couple. Here's
(32:12):
Emily and I re enacting the conversation as Rose recorded
it in her journal.
Speaker 5 (32:19):
Why do they place it in the Dakotahs?
Speaker 1 (32:21):
I don't know.
Speaker 5 (32:23):
The names aren't right, what names Charles and Caroline? They
don't belong in that place at.
Speaker 7 (32:28):
All, Rose internally, in her head, my mother has effectively
destroyed the simple perfection of my pleasure. Perhaps the most
extraordinary part of Rose's version is Rose pretending that she
had no idea why the story she had written was
written in the ways she'd written it. Rose liked to
(32:51):
claim she hadn't told Laura about Hurricane because her mother
never cared about her writing. But even if there were
a shred of truth to this statement, why had Rose
chosen to use the names Charles in Caroline, to use
the details of Laura's childhood that Rose knew were sacred
to her mother and also knew that her mother planned
(33:14):
to use in future books.
Speaker 11 (33:17):
Wilder felt betrayed, and why wouldn't you feel betrayed?
Speaker 1 (33:20):
Here's Pamela Smith Hilligan.
Speaker 11 (33:23):
I don't think she ever knew that the Saturday Evening
Post had again been interested in Pioneer Girl. I don't
think she ever knew that. But she did feel betrayed
because the main characters don't let the Hurricane row are
named Charles and Caroline. He plays the fiddle, she's quiet
and restrained. There were all kinds of episodes lifted directly
from Pioneer Girl. The whole book really comes directly from
(33:46):
Pioneer Girl. So she felt betrayed.
Speaker 7 (33:50):
It's difficult to know Laura's exact feelings on this because
she did not keep a journal, but there's a lot
of evidence that the hurricane incident caused a huge rift
between Laura and Rose. According to Caroline Fraser, the implosion
between the mother and daughter was so spectacular people in
Mansfield still speak about it today.
Speaker 3 (34:08):
There's still memories about this hanging around in Mansfield his story.
That's how big a deal it was.
Speaker 7 (34:16):
It all sounds cataclysmic. How could this have happened? How
could these two ever work together again? As was everything
to do with Laura and Rose, there are multiple theories,
and as always, because Laura herself never kept a record
of her own feelings, all these theories are guesswork. For instance,
(34:39):
did Rose go behind her mother's back and steal her
story for adult audiences and her own glory, or were
the two women in on this together and maybe Laura
was just surprised by the details of that story. It
was Hurricane just more proof of the confused, messy overlap
of these two women's person non professional lives. Or was
(35:02):
this just the biggest example yet of Rose's self destructive behavior?
And most importantly, how did all this impact the Little
House series, most of which had yet to be written.
Like all epic stories that are told over and over again,
(35:25):
details can get murky. This is especially true of Laura
and Rose, and because we have no version of Laura's side,
there's some debate whether Rose was deceiving Laura when she
wrote Let the Hurricane Roar, or whether Laura knew what Rose.
Speaker 1 (35:40):
Was up to and was just upset by some of
the details.
Speaker 7 (35:45):
There are some scholars who don't think Hurricane was a
huge deception on Rose's part. The family did need the money,
and writing was basically the family business by this point.
Speaker 2 (35:55):
From what I've been able to determine, Wilder knew that
Rose was going to fictionalize part of her autobiography. I
don't think that was a surprise to Laura.
Speaker 7 (36:13):
Bill Anderson agrees with this theory.
Speaker 6 (36:16):
I don't really think it was sneaky. This was a
family that was severely hurt by the depressions. Laura and
al Manzo and Rose were in this together in that
they were sharing the stories, Rose was modifying them, making
(36:36):
them publishable, and as a team they were able to
keep themselves out of poverty.
Speaker 7 (36:46):
Still, most scholars are in agreement that Laura was appalled
by the way Rose fictionalized her family stories.
Speaker 2 (36:54):
I think the surprise was that she didn't take the
Pioneer Girl so much as she took her mother's and
her father's story and confused it with Carolyn and Charles.
Wilder's first reaction to this story is, what are they
doing there? That's not right? Those people weren't there in
(37:16):
that time period.
Speaker 7 (37:18):
Whatever Rose and Laura's agreement, if there even was one,
Rose writing Hurricane the way she did did damage to
an already fraught relationship. It was the most public display
so far of a long shimmering resentment Rose had felt
towards her mother since childhood.
Speaker 3 (37:36):
You know, it was kind of an expression of Rose's
you know, passive aggression of her trying to get back
at her mother for things that had happened. There were
all these kind of old resentments and old assumptions. You know,
Rose was always saying, you know, she won't let me
grow up. She doesn't, you know, see me as an adult.
Speaker 7 (38:00):
The Hurricane incident, it's obvious that that childhood resentment was
now being mixed with some intense professional envy.
Speaker 11 (38:07):
I think she was the kind of writer who projected
this image of self confidence, and yet she was well
aware of her own limitations. And I do think, based
on what I've seen in the editorial correspondence between the two,
that on the one hand, Lane discounted her mother's work.
(38:30):
On the other hand, she knew that her mother was
becoming a best selling writer, and I think Lane did
feel a sense of rivalry with her mother, so all
of that was enormously complicated.
Speaker 7 (38:43):
We can only guess at Laura's feelings over this, however
enraged or hurt she might have been. We have no
record of it from her, but we do know for
a fact what she did. Laura did what she always
did in the face of calamity. She got to work.
Nancy tistag Koople believes Laura's way of coping with Rose's
(39:04):
deception was to get down on paper, even just for herself,
what had actually happened in those difficult early years of
her marriage to Almonzo.
Speaker 2 (39:15):
Her objection, I believe, was to the confusion that Lane
added to the story. And that's why I think she
wrote the First four Years, because she wanted to get
her own story down the way it happened, at least
in her mind, and not the way Lane would fictionalize it.
Speaker 7 (39:36):
This small act of testimony would end up complicating both
Laura and Rose's legacy in ways neither of them could
have foreseen. Laura's account of the worst years of her
life would eventually be published as the First four Years
and launch a decade long conspiracy theory over authorship of
the entire Little House series. But in the meantime, the
(39:59):
writing of the Little House series needed to go on,
and it was this necessity that may have saved Rose
and Laura's relationship.
Speaker 3 (40:07):
It is surprising that they were able to kind of
continue on together with the books.
Speaker 7 (40:13):
That's Caroline Fraser and in Prairie Fires, she writes there
may have been another reason Laura was able to forgive Rose.
After Laura discovered the hurricane deception, Rose plunged into such
a prolonged state of depression that Laura was worried about
her mental state and even feared for Rose's life. Laura's
anger may have been cut short by real concern over
(40:35):
her daughter's survival.
Speaker 3 (40:37):
I think Laura did have a really hot temper. I
think she knew it. She admitted it. You know, al
Manzo knew about it, he talked about it. But I
think she could also you know, analyze herself later and say, oh,
you know, I need to apologize for this. I think
she did apologize for some of the ways, you know,
(40:57):
in which she hurt wrote. And Laura could also just
be very sweet, you know. I mean, she had a
sweetness to her character and a generosity of spirit, which
is really admirable.
Speaker 7 (41:14):
Whatever the reason Laura and Rose's collaboration on Farmer Boy
is what saved their relationship. By this point, in nineteen
thirty three, Rose had left home, possibly to escape her
shame and Laura's wrath, and was on an extended research
trip in upstate New York. Although their relationship was still strained,
(41:35):
we can see from letters that their collaboration was beginning
to reignite.
Speaker 1 (41:40):
Here's Pamela smith Hill again.
Speaker 11 (41:43):
While she was away in New York, she sent postcards
back to her mom and visited Malone, New York, and
Wilder was already beginning. She had already written a draft
of Farmer Boy, but Lane sent back postcards, she said,
descriptions of Malone, New York. And so by the time
(42:03):
that they're reunited at Rocky Rich Farm and the holidays
are over, they began to work on another version of
Farmer Boy.
Speaker 7 (42:12):
Farmer Boy, Laura's follow up to Big Woods was based
on Almonzo's life. The first draft she and Rose turned in,
completed in the terrible aftermath of the Hurricane Deception, was
turned down. Laura and Rose received this news just as
Hurricane was publishing, which must have added salt to the
(42:33):
already terrible wound. One of the issues with Farmer Boy
is that Laura was writing about something she hadn't directly experienced,
and it showed she and Rose had to come back
together and do it again. Here's Pamela smith Hill again.
Speaker 11 (42:48):
I think Farmer Boy apparently was the project that healed
the rift between the two of them, because they worked
on that together, and then by the time that Farmer
Boy was accepted, something had triggered Wilder to think bigger
(43:09):
about her work, and really they collaborated throughout the nineteen thirties,
not just on the Little House series, but even on Freeland.
Speaker 7 (43:19):
Freeland is Lane's second novel, and it again pulls from
Laura and Almans's experience, as well as Laura's parents, Charles
and Carolines. Rose may have learned her lesson this time, though,
since the main characters are named David and Nettie, a
young couple who take up the offer of Freeland and
Dakota Territory.
Speaker 11 (43:40):
In nineteen thirty seven, when Lane was working on Freeland,
which comes directly from material out of Pioneer Girl, Wilder
was working on By the Shores of Silver Lake. They
were writing sometimes the same scene similar characters, and at
this point they were talking about it back and forth openly.
We have editorial correspondence.
Speaker 7 (44:00):
In nineteen thirty seven, the Saturday Evening Post paid Rose
thirty thousand dollars to serialize Freeland. That's more than six
hundred thousand dollars in today's money. That's more than the
biggest freelance magazine writer makes today. Freeland also seemed to
mark the end of the push and pull struggle over
(44:22):
who had to write to what parts of whose story.
Speaker 1 (44:26):
So by the.
Speaker 2 (44:27):
Late nineteen thirties they had pretty much sorted out how
they were going to go forward.
Speaker 7 (44:37):
Rose was now permanently living away from Mansfield and Laura
was gaining confidence in her own writing. Their collaboration continued,
but it was mostly by letter correspondence now, which perhaps
eased some of the intensity.
Speaker 1 (44:51):
Of their relationship.
Speaker 7 (44:54):
After Rose's departure, Laura and Almonzo returned to their own
dream house, Rocky Ridge Farm, where Laura wrote each day
in her specially built writing book with a view of
the garden. Each successive Little House Book was a great
success and brought increasing financial stability to both mother and daughter.
(45:14):
And yet the most surprising part of this intense collaboration
was still to come. No one involved could have foretold
its long and complicated legacy, which eventually reached all the
way to Hollywood and nearly made it to the White House.
We're still feeling the effects of Rose and Laura's extraordinary
(45:34):
relationship today in ways you may be shocked to discover.
That's next week in Part two of Rose Wilder. Lane
Wilder is written and hosted by Me, Glennis McNichol. Our
story editors our Joe Piazza and Emily Meronoff. Our senior
(45:57):
producer is Emily Meronoff. Our producers are Mary Do, Shina
Ozaki and Jessica Crinchich. Our associate producer is Lauren Phillip.
Sound design and mixing by Amanda Rose Smith.
Speaker 1 (46:09):
Our scene in.
Speaker 7 (46:10):
Additional music was composed by Alise McCoy. We are executive
produced by Joe Piazza, Nikki Tor, Ali Perry and Me.
If you're enjoying Wilder, please consider rating and reviewing us
on Apple Podcasts.
Speaker 1 (46:24):
It actually helps us out quite a lot.
Speaker 7 (46:26):
Thank you to the Laura Ingles Wilder Memorial Society in Dismet,
South Dakota, and the Laura Ingles Wilder Historic Home and
Museum in Mansfield, Missouri, and a special shout out to
Caroline Fraser, whose book Prairie Fires is the mother load
on Rose and Laura's relationship. Thank you, as always to
CDM Studios. Please see our show notes if you want
(46:48):
to know more about the people we interviewed, the places
we visited, the books we mentioned. You can also find
our contact and go there If you want to write
to us with your own thoughts and questions. Follow us
on Instagram at Wilder Underscore podcast and on TikTok at
Wilder Podcast, where you can see behind the scenes footage
from all our travels. Thank you for listening. We'll see
(47:08):
you next week.
Speaker 5 (47:11):
Like sand through the hour glass, so those the houses
Rose had no magic and she knew it.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Rose was a hack, but a lot of hacks are
really successful.
Speaker 3 (00:08):
She was a complicated lady.
Speaker 4 (00:11):
My friend Rose is very divisive. You either love her
or you don't like her at all.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
I find her just so despicable.
Speaker 5 (00:18):
Most of my personal reaction is to feel sorry for Laura.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
I'm like, man, this was her companion.
Speaker 3 (00:23):
She was a bit rhemian, and she just didn't think
like everybody else did. She's just a kind of louvishly
talented but incredibly frustrating personality.
Speaker 6 (00:36):
It is amazing the bad mouthing that goes on fifty
years after her death. I am so disgusted with that,
because I think Rose was a heroic woman.
Speaker 7 (00:51):
Laura Engels Wilder and her husband Almonzo had one living
child named Rose. If you only know Rose from the
Little House in the Perry Books, you don't know much.
In the first decades of the twentieth century, Rose Wilder
Lane was one of the most successful and controversial freelance
writers in the country.
Speaker 5 (01:10):
Rose was such a famous writer in her time. She
was so popular.
Speaker 7 (01:15):
Rose is the reason Laura, a middle aged farm wife,
picked up a pen and started writing about eggs Rose
told her to well.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
They'd had a symbiotic relationship related to writing for many,
many years. Rose would write her mother and suggest stories
that she should work up for the Missouri Ruralist or
some other Kansas or Missouri newspaper.
Speaker 7 (01:42):
Rose was also the one who encouraged her mother to
do more than write articles about farm life. Rose pushed
Laura to write the Little Housebooks and was integral to
the process.
Speaker 3 (01:53):
She was wrapped up so closely in pushing her mother
to do this riting, in editing and revising and getting
the books published. She has just woven into the whole
story in ways that you cannot ignore.
Speaker 7 (02:13):
And it was Rose, the world famous writer, scared of
being eclipsed by her mother's success, who overcome with jealousy
and resentment, almost derailed the entire Little House series before
it even got started. Behind the cozy, wholesome sweetness of
the Little House Books is a raging mother and daughter
(02:36):
relationship that is the stuff of soap operas and tabloid
talk shows.
Speaker 3 (02:41):
I mean, people in Mansfield still there's still memories about
this hanging around in Mansfield history. That's how big a
deal it was.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
But how did it get to this point.
Speaker 7 (02:54):
As far as Little House readers know, Rose only appears
in the First four Years, last and least well known
of the books. As the title suggests, the First four
Years covers Laura's first four years of marriage twelve monso
Rose arrives in the second year, a happy and healthy baby.
She's named after the prairie roses Laura loves so much.
(03:17):
A Rose in December was much rarer than a Rose
in June. Christmas was at hand, and Rose was a
grand present. It's a sweet, loving description that comes in
the middle of a very odd, off putting book. Unlike
the rest of the Little House series, the First four
Years is not an enjoyable read.
Speaker 4 (03:38):
Yeah, it is.
Speaker 3 (03:38):
Jarring, and I remember that same feeling reading it as
a kid, like what is this? Where did this come from?
Speaker 7 (03:45):
It's jarring because the First four Years is an unedited manuscript.
It was never meant to see the light of day.
It was nevertheless published after both Laura and Rose had died.
And yet the First four Years might be the most
pivotal book in the Little House series, written by Laura
in the aftermath of an epic implosion in Laura and
(04:06):
Rose's relationship. It eventually launched a decades long conspiracy theory
over the authorship of the Little House books. If you
look at all the available information, and you look at
Laura's writing, and you look at Rose wilder Lane's writing,
Rose wilder Lane wrote the books. Rose is woven into
the Little House creation story in ways you can't ignore.
(04:29):
However you feel about her, there's no question that more
than Laura's editors, more than Garth Williams, who later illustrated
the books, Rose is responsible for the Little House series.
But who was she really? In the first part of
this two part episode, we're going to meet Rose wilder Lane.
(04:50):
Where did she come from? What was her life like?
How did she become her mother's greatest collaborator and underminer?
Buckle up, I'm Glennis McNichol, and this is part one
of Rose wilder Lane. The thing about Rose wilder Lane
(05:53):
is her life story is the stuff of Hollywood, and
the fact she hasn't been given the Hollywood treatment is
a bit strange when you consider how much Hollywood Love's adventure,
drama and scandal like any classic American tale of Rose
had humble small town beginning the Ingles home.
Speaker 8 (06:13):
Everyone, this is the last house built by Charles Ingles.
Speaker 9 (06:17):
He built this house.
Speaker 8 (06:18):
In eighteen eighty seven and the family moved in on
Christmas Eve.
Speaker 7 (06:22):
Emily and Iron De Smet, South Dakota, a tiny town
on the eastern side of the state, surrounded by rolling farmland.
Dasmet is the setting of the last five Little House books,
and we're touring the Ingles home. It's a beautiful two
story house not far from De Smet's main street. At
some point it was inhabited by all of the Ingles
(06:43):
except for Laura, who was already married to Almonzo by
the time Charles built this house.
Speaker 8 (06:47):
This is a photograph of Laura had al Manzo shortly
after they were married in eighteen eighty five. They had
their daughter Rose on December fifth of eighteen eighty six,
and then their luck kind.
Speaker 1 (06:58):
Of ran out for a little while.
Speaker 7 (07:00):
It was during this difficult time for the Wilders that
Rose lived here in this house.
Speaker 8 (07:04):
Amanda Laura coughed diphtheria, which was a very common disease
at the time. While they were recovering their daughter, Rose
stayed here with her grandparents, and the original bedroom upstairs
became Rose's room.
Speaker 7 (07:16):
Despite the short time she spent here Rose featured prominently
in our tour. Even from stories about her as a baby,
evidence of her strong personality is present.
Speaker 4 (07:27):
This is a photograph of Rose when she was young.
Speaker 8 (07:30):
If you look closely, you'll see that she's wearing a
ring in this photograph.
Speaker 4 (07:35):
The photographer did not want her to.
Speaker 8 (07:37):
Be wearing this ring, so whenever he would pose her
for her portrait, he would have her hand cover up
the ring, But whenever he would go behind the sheet
to take the photo, she would always switch her hands back.
Speaker 9 (07:49):
Even as a child, she.
Speaker 4 (07:50):
Was very strong willed and independent.
Speaker 8 (07:53):
She grew up in to be quite the strong willed,
independent adult.
Speaker 7 (07:59):
Because so little known about Rose outside her minimal presence
in the books, the truth of Rose's early years can
come as quite a shock to readers who only know
her as the sweet baby Laura wrote about. But Rose
was a force of nature and her story is at
least as wild as Laura's, if not more so. I
talked Joe through her basic bio.
Speaker 4 (08:20):
Well walk me through, just walk me through her early
childhood and her life, And just like wrote, I want
to hear about Rose before she became Rose.
Speaker 3 (08:31):
Right.
Speaker 7 (08:33):
So, she was born in eighteen eighty six, in Dismet,
South Dakota, which we've been to because that's where Laura lived.
Laura was only nineteen when she got pregnant. They'd only
been married. Her and Almonzo had seven babies babies having babies,
Her and Almondo had only been married for one year.
Shortly after Rose was born, Laura Almonzo get diphtheria. Almonzo
(08:56):
has a stroke. He's partially paralyzed. Their crops fail, they
lose their house, they lose all their money.
Speaker 5 (09:03):
Laura has a.
Speaker 7 (09:04):
Baby boy who dies a few weeks after birth. Their
house burns down. Like it's a very traumatic early childhood.
They were very poor, right poor. They're so poor that
for her whole life, Rose had terrible teeth. She was
very resentful of that. She's a very very smart kid,
like she's very smart from a young age. And right
(09:27):
around the age of eight, they see an advertisement for
the Ozarks, the Land of Apples, and they decide to
move to the Ozarks. So they take the you know,
they go to the Ozarks with one one hundred dollars bill.
They get to the Ozarks and buy this land. But
it's called Rocky Ridge because it's full of rocks, and
(09:48):
it takes years to clear and years to be self sufficient.
They're deeply, deeply poor. Rose is dressed in I wouldn't
say rags, but she's not dressed well, and she's so
aware of this when she she goes to school, the
class discrepancy of how smart she is and how poor
she looks. And sometime in high school she's so advanced
(10:10):
that her mother sends her off to live with Eliza Jane,
Almonzo's sister. As much as Rose hated Mansfield and resented
her mother and adored her father, she always wanted to
leave Mansfield. She could never help. She was always coming back.
She was always coming home. She went to high school
with Eliza Jane comes back. But there's some sense, and
(10:33):
of course these things are hard to gauge, but there
is some sense in Caroline Fraser's book that Rose may
have been I mean, I'm using loaded words here, but
these are the words that I think would have been
attached to her at the time. She was like perhaps
a little promiscuous, that she, you know, liked boys and
was maybe a little risky for I mean, my god,
(10:57):
can you imagine what small town Ozarks would like fun
Rose and Laura had an extremely fraught relationship from very
early on because as a mother, I imagine there's a lot
of guilt in not being able to provide your daughter
with certain things or not knowing how to handle her.
Speaker 5 (11:15):
And Laura was a teen mom. They're so poor.
Speaker 7 (11:20):
She's got a husband with a disability, Laura's been working
since the age of nine, and she has a daughter
who is a lot to handle. So we know from
Laura writing about herself that she had a temper. She
was very candid about that when she wrote about her
childhood in the Little House series, and she was headstrong,
and I think you see that in Rose. You see
(11:42):
that sort of aggressiveness in the controlling nature. Caroline Fraser's
book Prairie Fires, she writes extensively about Rose, and Caroline writes,
you know, yes, Laura had a temper, but Laura was
willing to acknowledge that temper. But Laura was able to
recognize her laws and Rose seemed unable.
Speaker 4 (12:04):
Yeah, I imagine them butting heads. Right. You have these
two strong, ambitious, smart, ahead of their time women who
you know, I could already see it happening with my
own daughter, Like when you have these two strong personalities.
I think it becomes very difficult.
Speaker 7 (12:22):
Rose, which I think we can both relate to, got
the hell out of Mansfield, Missouri as soon as she could.
She met a man called je Lette Lane, Like, this
is the least surprising thing. A man named je Let Lane.
He's a confidence man, which man is a con man.
They were married for technically they were married for a while,
(12:44):
and they had a tumultuous marriage. They were, you know itinerant,
always trying to pull together con scam might be probably
cons funds, Yeah, probably cons. And Rose became pregnant and
then had a still birth, and a very very difficult
still birth that made it impossible for her to have
(13:06):
children after that, and was ill for quite some like
in the hospital for quite a long time, and eventually
their marriage falls apart. She goes to San Francisco on
her own and read about nineteen fifteen.
Speaker 4 (13:23):
Not how old was she then?
Speaker 7 (13:24):
She would have been in nineteen fifteen, she would have
been almost thirty. She falls for divorce, which in nineteen fifteen,
even in San Francisco, is scandalous.
Speaker 1 (13:35):
Not a small thing.
Speaker 7 (13:36):
Yeah, And right around this time, you know, Rose is
alone in San Francisco and she writes Laura this incredibly
endearing letter and asking Laura to come to San Francisco
and visit her. She says, dearest Mama Bess, which is
what she called Laura her whole life, because Almonzo called
(13:57):
Laura Bess, and so the fact that Rose includes her
first name sort of is like she sees her mother
as a bit of a contemporary, even from a young age.
But dearest Mama Bess, I simply can't stand being so
homesick for you anymore. You must plan to come out
here in July or at latest August. You've simply all
cap got to. I can send you five dollars a
(14:19):
week to make up for what you will lose in chickens,
et cetera.
Speaker 1 (14:22):
By the trip.
Speaker 4 (14:23):
I think that's sweet.
Speaker 1 (14:24):
It is sweet.
Speaker 7 (14:25):
And also knowing that in so many of Rose's journals
she wrote with deep resentment over giving her parents money.
It's like she is internally conflicted about how much she
loves and needs them, like her mother, particularly like they're
so intertwined they cannot separate from each other even in
their worst moments. Their lives are so connected and they
(14:49):
need each other so badly. Anyway, Roses in San Francisco,
she gets divorced, she gets a job at the San
Francisco Bulletin as a secretary, but then her talents are
noticed almost immediately, and she gets moved up into an
editor position. And then she gets moved up into a
reporter position and starts going out and reporting stories.
Speaker 4 (15:11):
Wow, that's amazing, Yeah yeah yeah wow. So what kind
of newspaper was that? Was that, say, the New York
Times or the New York Post.
Speaker 7 (15:24):
Well, this is still the heyday of yellow journalism, right,
and many newspapers at that time encouraged a degree of
salaciousness and exaggeration.
Speaker 4 (15:34):
Scandal and scandal cells.
Speaker 7 (15:36):
Scandal, And you know, into this world arrives Rose, who
it turns out, has an enormous talent for taking a
kernel of truth and turning it into a fantastic tale that.
Speaker 4 (15:50):
Is maybe or maybe not true.
Speaker 5 (15:53):
Right, Like, there's a.
Speaker 7 (15:54):
Very tenuous connection and she was really really good at it.
And again it's easy in hindsight to be like, oh,
that's very shoddy journalism. But having survived both of us
on the blogosphere and entabloid papers in your case, it's
like she's a single woman supporting herself in a city.
Speaker 4 (16:13):
That's not easy, not an easy city.
Speaker 7 (16:16):
No, and she's supporting two aging parents who are financially unstable.
You know, in Missouri, it's like, if you're good at this.
Speaker 4 (16:26):
Lean in, lean in. And she leaned right, she leaned, and.
Speaker 1 (16:30):
She was very good. You know, she's so good at that.
Speaker 7 (16:33):
She immediately starts pitching these biographies of you know, Herbert Hoover,
who is a politician, then and Charlie Chaplin and Jack London,
and pitches them to publishing houses and to their relatives
and in one case to Charlie Chaplin himself.
Speaker 1 (16:48):
I think, as like.
Speaker 7 (16:50):
Highly researched, respectable biographies, and they participated. And then these
so called biographies get published and they are less by biographies,
then fantastical tales with one or two facts in them
and a number I think Jack London's widow sued her,
(17:11):
Charlie Chaplin tried to sue her. Herbert Hoover was like,
wanted to distance himself from her, He wanted nothing to
do with her. Henry Ford's widow was furious. But the
thing about all that that stands out to me is
that she was not apologetic. It's not like she was like, oh,
you caught me. She was like, what are you talking about?
I wrote a great book. It makes you look fantastic.
Speaker 4 (17:31):
She sounds amazing to me. I stand by my earlier statement.
I think Rose sounds like a lot of fun.
Speaker 9 (17:36):
She also sounds like she could have worked at Cocker.
All of the things she's doing again feel very relatable
and very modern, and she was very good at it.
Speaker 7 (17:46):
And she is definitely making questionable decisions. But by the
early twenties, she's making bank They paid so highly, and
she was so good at these. She moved into short
story writing, which in the twenty for magazines was very profitable.
She started traveling, like she traveled to Albania, She hiked
the mountains by herself. She was all over Europe after
(18:09):
the war. She was in Paris in the nineteen twenties
with that crowd.
Speaker 4 (18:14):
Yeah, yeah, good Paris. Time, good Paris.
Speaker 7 (18:17):
She was in her forties, and she apparently she apparently
attended an orgy as an observer. We don't think she participated,
but again.
Speaker 1 (18:27):
Who knows.
Speaker 4 (18:28):
We don't know, We don't know.
Speaker 7 (18:30):
Again, our sense of this too, Caroline Fraser writes, like
our sense of her in these time periods are sometimes
coming from her sort of colleagues, many of whom are
not nice about her. And we both know writing about
women who strong personalities is a very tenuous business.
Speaker 4 (18:47):
History is not kind to strong women.
Speaker 7 (18:48):
But colleagues are not kind to strong women like no,
And again, Rose was a very difficult person, and she
had very questionable views on a number of issues. You know,
in hindsight, we see her as this incredibly adventurous, talented
woman who's traveling around Europe, you know, after the war.
(19:11):
She's in Albania, she's hiking in the mountains by herself,
and she's in Paris and it's so enviable. But Rose
herself was so ashamed of the poverty that she'd been
raised in, and it was something she carried with her
her whole life, which is, I think, something to remember,
like these things from childhood that we carry don't just
go away.
Speaker 1 (19:32):
And she wrote in her journal like Rose is.
Speaker 7 (19:34):
A big diary keeper, which is how we know a
lot of this, right, We know a lot of this
from Rose's own diary, so you have to sort of
read it, read between the lines.
Speaker 1 (19:41):
From time to time.
Speaker 7 (19:42):
She's not the most reliable narrator, as we've established, but
she She wrote in her diary in the late twenties
and said, I would change places with any young woman
with intelligent, simple, harmonious parents, good health, and a cultured background.
And I mean, we know this, but we all know
(20:03):
from social media that you're drawn to the depiction of
the thing you feel you don't have. And it's so
clear that Rose desperately wanted to not have come from poverty,
to have been better educated, to have had parents who
she felt should have been more loving to her.
Speaker 4 (20:23):
I feel that really hard, though, because I grew up
with parents who were both a hot mess, and all
I wanted growing up was stability. And so that line
that she writes and the guest, I would have traded
with any girl who had a stable home and who
had the things that I didn't have. And I think
(20:43):
that it made me a massive striver as an.
Speaker 5 (20:46):
Adult and someone who has a great deal of stability.
Speaker 4 (20:50):
Now you exactly, yeah, Yeah, who built stability because I
did not have it as a child.
Speaker 7 (20:57):
Rose definitely craves stability throughout her life, and for a
long time she had the funds to achieve it, but
at every turn Rose managed to undermine herself, making an
endless series of bad financial decisions just when she got
closest to getting the thing she wanted. But nothing would
compare to what Rose did when she returned to Mansfield,
Missouri in the late nineteen twenties. Rosa spent her entire
(21:20):
life trying to get away from Rocky Ridge, and now
she was back, and the first thing she did was
use her money to build her parents a new house,
a house that neither Laura or Almonza wanted or needed.
This house would become the setting of the most explosive,
damaging decision Rose ever made, one her mother Laura never
(21:43):
got over.
Speaker 10 (21:50):
I think it's this.
Speaker 11 (21:53):
Wilder rock house nine hundred.
Speaker 7 (21:56):
Feet remember Laura's house Rocky Ridge in Mansfield, Missouri, are
designed to her own specifications, right down to the height
of the kitchen counter.
Speaker 1 (22:05):
Well up the hill, there's another house, the Rock House.
I love this house.
Speaker 4 (22:16):
I don't want to live in this house.
Speaker 1 (22:19):
These windows.
Speaker 2 (22:20):
Rose built this as a little, uh retiredment home before
her parents.
Speaker 7 (22:25):
The Rock House cost eleven thousand dollars to build, close
to two hundred thousand dollars in today's money, and became
a metaphor for Rose's relationship with her parents. After childhood
of severe poverty. Rose wanted them to have something beautiful
and expensive, proof of her success and value in the world.
Speaker 10 (22:45):
To me, it looks like such a glamorous house, these
Florida ceiling windows and the armed doors and the casement windows.
Speaker 4 (22:51):
It's so.
Speaker 1 (22:53):
Like it could be in a Hollywood film.
Speaker 7 (22:55):
No expense was spared, and was there electricity in the house?
Speaker 4 (22:59):
Yes?
Speaker 2 (23:00):
Rose brought down the electricity at her own expense.
Speaker 10 (23:04):
From what I recall, I don't think very many houses
in this part of the state had access to electricity.
Speaker 1 (23:10):
Is that now.
Speaker 2 (23:12):
Most of them didn't get electricity until the forties. But
and it cost her three thousand dollars, which in those
days is my way.
Speaker 7 (23:22):
For those wondering, three thousand dollars in nineteen twenty eight
is the equivalent of fifty three thousand dollars in today's money.
So Rose built her dream house, insisting it was also
her parents' dream house and the best thing for them.
But neither Laura nor Almonzo particularly wanted to live there.
(23:43):
They had built Rocky Ridge to their own specifications. Still,
Rose was a big personality, and Laura and Almonzo could
never seem to say no to her. So up the
hill they went to live in the Rock House and
down into Rocky Ridge, a place she'd spent most of
life trying to escape. Went Rose. Then the market crashed.
(24:06):
This hit the Wilder family hard. Rose lost all of
her money and all of Laura's money that she'd invested
for them.
Speaker 11 (24:15):
It was a.
Speaker 7 (24:16):
Brutal loss and through the family back into the financial
chaos and insecurity they'd spent their entire lives trying to
climb out of.
Speaker 6 (24:24):
In nineteen thirty one, their brokerage firm collapsed.
Speaker 1 (24:29):
This is Bill Anderson. He's written aboutlawa extensively.
Speaker 6 (24:33):
Rose had encouraged her folks to invest, and she was
heavily invested. And that's when they really were faced with
what are we going to do now? Financially?
Speaker 1 (24:46):
Rose is a single woman.
Speaker 7 (24:48):
Even before the Rock House, she'd been helping her parents
out financially for a long time. Now, in addition to
herself and her parents, there were two houses and no money.
Add to this the guilt she felt over losing her parents' money,
and it was all too much. Throughout her life, Rose
had suffered bouts of depression. We know from Rose's diaries
(25:11):
that she often escaped gooted Laura for everything that was
wrong in her life. In one entry that was typical
of this resentment, Rose wrote, it is amazing how my
mother can make me suffer. How she hates it that
I'm her sole source of support, Implicit in every syllable
and tone, the fact that I've failed, fallen down on
(25:32):
the job, been the broken read. The picture Rose pains
of herself in her journals is that of a woman
who runs on martyrdom and bitterness, and is incapable of
accepting any love shown to her by Laura. The curious
thing is that she's sincerely reaching for some kind of
companionship with me. She's trying to be friends. She wants
(25:56):
genuine warmth, sympathy. She has not the faint notion of
what she's doing to me, But underneath there's not a
trace of generosity in her. For most of her adult life,
Rose had insisted on supplementing her parents' finances and resented it.
But in the aftermath of the financial crash, it was
(26:17):
Rose who was completely overcome, And it was at this
moment that Laura, a person who'd been through many severe
ups and downs in her life, sat down and wrote
her memoir Pioneer Girl. You will remember from our last
episode about the writing of the Little House Books that
Laura initially wrote her memoir Pioneer Girl for adults, but
(26:38):
that when Rose took it to her publishing contexts, it
didn't sell. Rose then reworked it as a young children's story,
and that did get some attention, and then Laura and
Rose took that and reworked it into Little House in
the Big Woods, and boom. Laura's editor called the result
a book No Depression Can Stop. While that was happening,
(27:00):
Rose was writing too, working on something that she hoped
might be a bestseller all her own, well.
Speaker 1 (27:08):
Sort of her own.
Speaker 7 (27:10):
Here's where things get absolutely insane.
Speaker 1 (27:15):
Here's what happens.
Speaker 7 (27:17):
Laura sells A Little House in the Big Woods in
nineteen thirty two to great excitement. She works with Rose
on Edits for Big Woods to ready it for publication.
At the same time Rose is helping Laura, she is
also secretly writing a novel tw to let, The Hurricane Roar,
which she sells to the Saturday Evening post Let. The
(27:38):
Hurricane Roar is about a couple, Charles and Caroline. They
are homesteaders in South Dakota who live in a dugout
on wild Plum Creek. Charles plays the violin, They have
a baby, Their crops are destroyed by grasshoppers. Charles has
to walk hundreds of miles east to find work. Caroline
(28:00):
survives a blizzard alone in the house. Does any of
this sound familiar? Laura's parents' names are Charles and Caroline.
Laura lived in a dugout on Plum Creek. Hurricane is
basically a mesh of stories from Laura's own childhood, which
Rose knew Laura intended to utilize in future books, mixed
(28:20):
with facts from Laura's early marriage to alm Monzo.
Speaker 1 (28:24):
No really.
Speaker 7 (28:26):
At the same time Laura was celebrating the publication of
Big Woods, Rose wrote a novel based on her mother's
life and sold that under her own name to The
Saturday Evening Post, which serialized it. The crazier thing is
that Rose may have done it without her mother's permission
or even Laura's knowledge.
Speaker 11 (28:48):
We cannot know with one hundred percent accuracy if Rose
wilder Lane wrote Let the Hurricane Warren's Secret, but it
looks very very likely that she did, and I actually
think it was a little bit more insidious than that.
Speaker 7 (29:04):
Up until nineteen thirty two, Rose had never shown any
interest in writing about the pioneer life. She'd been asked
to you by various editors, but had never been excited
by the idea until she and her mother tried to
sell Pioneer Girl to the Saturday Evening Post. As you'll remember,
Rose told her mother that Pioneer Girl was rejected, but
(29:26):
that might not have been the whole truth. Apparently, after
turning it down, the Saturday Evening Post may have reconsidered.
Speaker 11 (29:34):
Lane's literary agent got back in touch with her and said, Hey,
I've heard from the Saturday Evening Post and they are
interested in a nonfiction serial about the Pioneer days and
they wanted me to get in touch with you, but
now they're interested in Pioneer Girl. Apparently Lane never told
her mother that, and so you know, Saturday Evening Post ultimately,
(29:58):
of course, bought Let the Hurricane Roar. It was published
in the fall of nineteen thirty two, and then shortly
after the book was published, Lane left Rocky Rich Farm
on an extended trip back east.
Speaker 12 (30:12):
I want to get this straight, so let me recap
for a second. After Little House in the Big Woods.
Rose started writing her own novel, which was a fictionalized
version of her parents, Laura and al Manzo's marriage, but
she changed the names to Laura's parents, Charles and Caroline,
(30:33):
and she did this all without telling her mom she
was doing it.
Speaker 7 (30:38):
Yes, I'm nodding my head emphatically, like we're on a
talk show right now and you're Oprah and we're like
what the whole audience is like, what, Like, doesn't it
feel like we're on some crazy talk show?
Speaker 4 (30:50):
It feels more Jerry Springer tonight.
Speaker 1 (30:52):
It totally feels Jerry.
Speaker 5 (30:54):
This is a Jerry Springer episode.
Speaker 7 (30:56):
Imagine doing that to your mother. So like Rose is
simultaneously spends her life trying to get away from Mansfield
and her mother, and yet spends her life also writing
about her mother or like stealing her mother's stories. It
is a Jerry Springer show.
Speaker 4 (31:16):
It is, And her mother didn't even know.
Speaker 5 (31:19):
Yeah, like crazy.
Speaker 7 (31:22):
Eventually Laura did find out, and she didn't take the
news well. According to Laura's biographer Caroline Fraser, Laura found
out about the deception dring a get together in her
own home with Rose present when Rose's friend, not knowing
it was a secret brought out copies of the advanced
advertisements for Hurricane. The advertisements were illustrations of Charles and Caroline,
(31:50):
Laura's beloved parents, as dashing Hollywood esque figures, gazing into
the future, as if they had been cast in some
larger than life screen epic romance. Laura was stunned and confused.
According to Rose's own journals, Laura wanted to know why
her parents were in Dakota as a young couple. Here's
(32:12):
Emily and I re enacting the conversation as Rose recorded
it in her journal.
Speaker 5 (32:19):
Why do they place it in the Dakotahs?
Speaker 1 (32:21):
I don't know.
Speaker 5 (32:23):
The names aren't right, what names Charles and Caroline? They
don't belong in that place at.
Speaker 7 (32:28):
All, Rose internally, in her head, my mother has effectively
destroyed the simple perfection of my pleasure. Perhaps the most
extraordinary part of Rose's version is Rose pretending that she
had no idea why the story she had written was
written in the ways she'd written it. Rose liked to
(32:51):
claim she hadn't told Laura about Hurricane because her mother
never cared about her writing. But even if there were
a shred of truth to this statement, why had Rose
chosen to use the names Charles in Caroline, to use
the details of Laura's childhood that Rose knew were sacred
to her mother and also knew that her mother planned
(33:14):
to use in future books.
Speaker 11 (33:17):
Wilder felt betrayed, and why wouldn't you feel betrayed?
Speaker 1 (33:20):
Here's Pamela Smith Hilligan.
Speaker 11 (33:23):
I don't think she ever knew that the Saturday Evening
Post had again been interested in Pioneer Girl. I don't
think she ever knew that. But she did feel betrayed
because the main characters don't let the Hurricane row are
named Charles and Caroline. He plays the fiddle, she's quiet
and restrained. There were all kinds of episodes lifted directly
from Pioneer Girl. The whole book really comes directly from
(33:46):
Pioneer Girl. So she felt betrayed.
Speaker 7 (33:50):
It's difficult to know Laura's exact feelings on this because
she did not keep a journal, but there's a lot
of evidence that the hurricane incident caused a huge rift
between Laura and Rose. According to Caroline Fraser, the implosion
between the mother and daughter was so spectacular people in
Mansfield still speak about it today.
Speaker 3 (34:08):
There's still memories about this hanging around in Mansfield his story.
That's how big a deal it was.
Speaker 7 (34:16):
It all sounds cataclysmic. How could this have happened? How
could these two ever work together again? As was everything
to do with Laura and Rose, there are multiple theories,
and as always, because Laura herself never kept a record
of her own feelings, all these theories are guesswork. For instance,
(34:39):
did Rose go behind her mother's back and steal her
story for adult audiences and her own glory, or were
the two women in on this together and maybe Laura
was just surprised by the details of that story. It
was Hurricane just more proof of the confused, messy overlap
of these two women's person non professional lives. Or was
(35:02):
this just the biggest example yet of Rose's self destructive behavior?
And most importantly, how did all this impact the Little
House series, most of which had yet to be written.
Like all epic stories that are told over and over again,
(35:25):
details can get murky. This is especially true of Laura
and Rose, and because we have no version of Laura's side,
there's some debate whether Rose was deceiving Laura when she
wrote Let the Hurricane Roar, or whether Laura knew what Rose.
Speaker 1 (35:40):
Was up to and was just upset by some of
the details.
Speaker 7 (35:45):
There are some scholars who don't think Hurricane was a
huge deception on Rose's part. The family did need the money,
and writing was basically the family business by this point.
Speaker 2 (35:55):
From what I've been able to determine, Wilder knew that
Rose was going to fictionalize part of her autobiography. I
don't think that was a surprise to Laura.
Speaker 7 (36:13):
Bill Anderson agrees with this theory.
Speaker 6 (36:16):
I don't really think it was sneaky. This was a
family that was severely hurt by the depressions. Laura and
al Manzo and Rose were in this together in that
they were sharing the stories, Rose was modifying them, making
(36:36):
them publishable, and as a team they were able to
keep themselves out of poverty.
Speaker 7 (36:46):
Still, most scholars are in agreement that Laura was appalled
by the way Rose fictionalized her family stories.
Speaker 2 (36:54):
I think the surprise was that she didn't take the
Pioneer Girl so much as she took her mother's and
her father's story and confused it with Carolyn and Charles.
Wilder's first reaction to this story is, what are they
doing there? That's not right? Those people weren't there in
(37:16):
that time period.
Speaker 7 (37:18):
Whatever Rose and Laura's agreement, if there even was one,
Rose writing Hurricane the way she did did damage to
an already fraught relationship. It was the most public display
so far of a long shimmering resentment Rose had felt
towards her mother since childhood.
Speaker 3 (37:36):
You know, it was kind of an expression of Rose's
you know, passive aggression of her trying to get back
at her mother for things that had happened. There were
all these kind of old resentments and old assumptions. You know,
Rose was always saying, you know, she won't let me
grow up. She doesn't, you know, see me as an adult.
Speaker 7 (38:00):
The Hurricane incident, it's obvious that that childhood resentment was
now being mixed with some intense professional envy.
Speaker 11 (38:07):
I think she was the kind of writer who projected
this image of self confidence, and yet she was well
aware of her own limitations. And I do think, based
on what I've seen in the editorial correspondence between the two,
that on the one hand, Lane discounted her mother's work.
(38:30):
On the other hand, she knew that her mother was
becoming a best selling writer, and I think Lane did
feel a sense of rivalry with her mother, so all
of that was enormously complicated.
Speaker 7 (38:43):
We can only guess at Laura's feelings over this, however
enraged or hurt she might have been. We have no
record of it from her, but we do know for
a fact what she did. Laura did what she always
did in the face of calamity. She got to work.
Nancy tistag Koople believes Laura's way of coping with Rose's
(39:04):
deception was to get down on paper, even just for herself,
what had actually happened in those difficult early years of
her marriage to Almonzo.
Speaker 2 (39:15):
Her objection, I believe, was to the confusion that Lane
added to the story. And that's why I think she
wrote the First four Years, because she wanted to get
her own story down the way it happened, at least
in her mind, and not the way Lane would fictionalize it.
Speaker 7 (39:36):
This small act of testimony would end up complicating both
Laura and Rose's legacy in ways neither of them could
have foreseen. Laura's account of the worst years of her
life would eventually be published as the First four Years
and launch a decade long conspiracy theory over authorship of
the entire Little House series. But in the meantime, the
(39:59):
writing of the Little House series needed to go on,
and it was this necessity that may have saved Rose
and Laura's relationship.
Speaker 3 (40:07):
It is surprising that they were able to kind of
continue on together with the books.
Speaker 7 (40:13):
That's Caroline Fraser and in Prairie Fires, she writes there
may have been another reason Laura was able to forgive Rose.
After Laura discovered the hurricane deception, Rose plunged into such
a prolonged state of depression that Laura was worried about
her mental state and even feared for Rose's life. Laura's
anger may have been cut short by real concern over
(40:35):
her daughter's survival.
Speaker 3 (40:37):
I think Laura did have a really hot temper. I
think she knew it. She admitted it. You know, al
Manzo knew about it, he talked about it. But I
think she could also you know, analyze herself later and say, oh,
you know, I need to apologize for this. I think
she did apologize for some of the ways, you know,
(40:57):
in which she hurt wrote. And Laura could also just
be very sweet, you know. I mean, she had a
sweetness to her character and a generosity of spirit, which
is really admirable.
Speaker 7 (41:14):
Whatever the reason Laura and Rose's collaboration on Farmer Boy
is what saved their relationship. By this point, in nineteen
thirty three, Rose had left home, possibly to escape her
shame and Laura's wrath, and was on an extended research
trip in upstate New York. Although their relationship was still strained,
(41:35):
we can see from letters that their collaboration was beginning
to reignite.
Speaker 1 (41:40):
Here's Pamela smith Hill again.
Speaker 11 (41:43):
While she was away in New York, she sent postcards
back to her mom and visited Malone, New York, and
Wilder was already beginning. She had already written a draft
of Farmer Boy, but Lane sent back postcards, she said,
descriptions of Malone, New York. And so by the time
(42:03):
that they're reunited at Rocky Rich Farm and the holidays
are over, they began to work on another version of
Farmer Boy.
Speaker 7 (42:12):
Farmer Boy, Laura's follow up to Big Woods was based
on Almonzo's life. The first draft she and Rose turned in,
completed in the terrible aftermath of the Hurricane Deception, was
turned down. Laura and Rose received this news just as
Hurricane was publishing, which must have added salt to the
(42:33):
already terrible wound. One of the issues with Farmer Boy
is that Laura was writing about something she hadn't directly experienced,
and it showed she and Rose had to come back
together and do it again. Here's Pamela smith Hill again.
Speaker 11 (42:48):
I think Farmer Boy apparently was the project that healed
the rift between the two of them, because they worked
on that together, and then by the time that Farmer
Boy was accepted, something had triggered Wilder to think bigger
(43:09):
about her work, and really they collaborated throughout the nineteen thirties,
not just on the Little House series, but even on Freeland.
Speaker 7 (43:19):
Freeland is Lane's second novel, and it again pulls from
Laura and Almans's experience, as well as Laura's parents, Charles
and Carolines. Rose may have learned her lesson this time, though,
since the main characters are named David and Nettie, a
young couple who take up the offer of Freeland and
Dakota Territory.
Speaker 11 (43:40):
In nineteen thirty seven, when Lane was working on Freeland,
which comes directly from material out of Pioneer Girl, Wilder
was working on By the Shores of Silver Lake. They
were writing sometimes the same scene similar characters, and at
this point they were talking about it back and forth openly.
We have editorial correspondence.
Speaker 7 (44:00):
In nineteen thirty seven, the Saturday Evening Post paid Rose
thirty thousand dollars to serialize Freeland. That's more than six
hundred thousand dollars in today's money. That's more than the
biggest freelance magazine writer makes today. Freeland also seemed to
mark the end of the push and pull struggle over
(44:22):
who had to write to what parts of whose story.
Speaker 1 (44:26):
So by the.
Speaker 2 (44:27):
Late nineteen thirties they had pretty much sorted out how
they were going to go forward.
Speaker 7 (44:37):
Rose was now permanently living away from Mansfield and Laura
was gaining confidence in her own writing. Their collaboration continued,
but it was mostly by letter correspondence now, which perhaps
eased some of the intensity.
Speaker 1 (44:51):
Of their relationship.
Speaker 7 (44:54):
After Rose's departure, Laura and Almonzo returned to their own
dream house, Rocky Ridge Farm, where Laura wrote each day
in her specially built writing book with a view of
the garden. Each successive Little House Book was a great
success and brought increasing financial stability to both mother and daughter.
(45:14):
And yet the most surprising part of this intense collaboration
was still to come. No one involved could have foretold
its long and complicated legacy, which eventually reached all the
way to Hollywood and nearly made it to the White House.
We're still feeling the effects of Rose and Laura's extraordinary
(45:34):
relationship today in ways you may be shocked to discover.
That's next week in Part two of Rose Wilder. Lane
Wilder is written and hosted by Me, Glennis McNichol. Our
story editors our Joe Piazza and Emily Meronoff. Our senior
(45:57):
producer is Emily Meronoff. Our producers are Mary Do, Shina
Ozaki and Jessica Crinchich. Our associate producer is Lauren Phillip.
Sound design and mixing by Amanda Rose Smith.
Speaker 1 (46:09):
Our scene in.
Speaker 7 (46:10):
Additional music was composed by Alise McCoy. We are executive
produced by Joe Piazza, Nikki Tor, Ali Perry and Me.
If you're enjoying Wilder, please consider rating and reviewing us
on Apple Podcasts.
Speaker 1 (46:24):
It actually helps us out quite a lot.
Speaker 7 (46:26):
Thank you to the Laura Ingles Wilder Memorial Society in Dismet,
South Dakota, and the Laura Ingles Wilder Historic Home and
Museum in Mansfield, Missouri, and a special shout out to
Caroline Fraser, whose book Prairie Fires is the mother load
on Rose and Laura's relationship. Thank you, as always to
CDM Studios. Please see our show notes if you want
(46:48):
to know more about the people we interviewed, the places
we visited, the books we mentioned. You can also find
our contact and go there If you want to write
to us with your own thoughts and questions. Follow us
on Instagram at Wilder Underscore podcast and on TikTok at
Wilder Podcast, where you can see behind the scenes footage
from all our travels. Thank you for listening. We'll see
(47:08):
you next week.
Speaker 5 (47:11):
Like sand through the hour glass, so those the houses
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