NEW INFORMATION!!!

Just released, a hard cover book called Mary On Her Own. Written by Elizabeth Kimmel Willard, this book is written from Mary's perspective about her time in the College for the Blind in Iowa.

Also just released: Nellie Olsen Meets Laura Ingalls, written by Heather Williams and from Nellie's perspective.

What a fantastic find for those of us who just can NOT get enough of our Little House!

Many people believe the eight books in the boxed set are all the books that exist in the Little House on the Prairie series. Surprise! Caroline has her own series! As do Caroline's mother Charlotte and Charlotte's mother Martha...and, most extensively, Laura's daughter Rose Wilder Lane. From the 1700's to the early 1900's, from Scotland to San Francisco, we see 200 years of travel and development.

What follows is a brief synopsis of each book in the series. We will begin with Laura and then Rose. After, we'll go backwards to Caroline in Wisconsin, Charlotte in Boston and Mary in the Highlands of Scotland. This is a work in progress, so please bear with me. It will take some time to complete.

Laura Ingalls Wilder
Born 1867

Laura's story begins in the "Big Woods" of Lake Pepin, Wisconsin, where her family is carving out their living on a small farm.  In Little House in the Big Woods, we learn about maple syrup time, and learn that candy was made from pouring boiled sap syrup into pans of snow. We are reminded that children got stung by bees then too, and were jealous over each other's hair color.  We learn that Pa Ingalls made his own bullets, as many had to. Store bought bullets were very expensive and the Ingalls family never was rich when it came to money.

The Charles Ingalls we know was notorious for his itchy wandering foot. As adults ourselves now, we know he did not come to his decision lightly; but he did eventually decide to pack up and move out West where there was sky to share.  In Little House on the Prairie, We see through Laura's eyes the difficulties of such a journey, and our little hearts are broken when Jack, the faithful bulldog, is thought lost in the raging river. We worry for Ma Ingalls when her ankle is hurt very badly in an accident while building the tiny log cabin. And we meet the illustrious Mr. Edwards, who knows lots of songs and teaches Laura how to spit. I'm sure Caroline was just delighted!

We have seen dozens of movies about the old west. Here is an account (fictionalized, to be sure, but accurate enough in description) from a person who was there to see it first hand. The perceptions of a child at seeing Indians in the house, some friendly and others who have come to steal from the Ingalls. We are taught that the white man made the Indians move on. What we are not taught is that in some areas, the white settlers were forced out by our Army. This is what happened to the Ingalls. House raised and with a roof, barn up to protect the animals, a well dug, and vegetables flourishing in the garden...and the Ingalls must leave it all.

So where do the Ingalls go? We'll find out in a moment. First we learn about Almanzo.

In the sets of books, Farmer Boy is the third book. But in actuality, it was published in 1933, after Little House in the Big Woods (1932). Farmer Boy is the story of Almanzo Wilder's family in upstate New York. Their farm was larger and they were much more well-off than the Ingalls. This is evidenced in many ways. The selling prices for horses raised by Mr. Wilder, for bales of hay and pounds of butter. And at least two of the Wilder sisters attended girls' finishing school in which they boarded at the school. We learn that little boys had to care for their moccasins and learn to milk the cows and care for all the animals.And we learn that the teacher didn't always have his own place to stay. In this farming community, families boarded the teacher for a week or two each.

Boys are boys and their interests really don't change. Playing in the snow, arguing with siblings, eating  (food figures large in young Almanzo's life), Christmas and Birthdays...and we learn how a family had to cut its own ice and store it in a special building if they wanted to make ice cream in the summer and have a cold drink. And we get a small glimpse of the very first breakfast cereal. One of Almanzo's favorite foods was popcorn with milk, essentially the first "puffed" cereal.

Where has the Ingalls family gone? In reality, they did some traveling back and forth. In the books, they went to Plum Creek. On the Banks of Plum Creek is the next in the series. We begin with their arrival. Pa trades the mustangs for a dugout home--literally a space dug out from the deep bank of a hill. The family gets a new start and the place is aptly named in our title. Plum trees abound here and Laura and Mary enjoy playing in the creek and rolling down haystacks. Here they attend their very first school.

And here we meet the infamous Nellie Olsen. The rivalry begins! Nellie is mean, Laura gets back. Life is good...until the locusts come. Pa's wheat fields are almost ripe. Life is rich. The new start is very promising.  And the cloud on the horizon turns out not to be rain. A plague of grasshoppers descends on the area and eats everything that is edible. The Ingalls are ruined.  Charles does his best to hang on, but must face reality. There is nothing to do. He leaves Ma and the girls and walks East 200 miles to find work. This is another of those very real events. Many hundreds of men were faced with the same situation that year. This is one of those places where the television series also intersects with the books.

Next is By the Shores of Silver Lake. As this book begins, we learn that Mary has had Scarlet Fever and is blind.  The television series wrote Mary as angry and self-pitying. We do not see any of this in the books. She's as sweet and good as ever, and now it's Laura's job to describe what she sees. In essence, this is when Laura the Writer is born. Also born is baby sister Grace. There is one notable death in this story as well, but it is not the son written about in the television series. Laura found that subject too heart wrenching and so did not write about her baby brother.

Times are still hard for the Ingalls, though they are trying to recover from the grasshoppers. Pa takes a job on a railroad and goes out ahead to get himself situated. When he's ready, he sends for his family to come join them. The Ingalls ladies travel on a train for the first time.Laura takes the time to tell us how the railroad was made--another monumental moment in history she witnessed first hand.

Once the railroad moves on, Charles decides not to continue. The country is wide open. They are in South Dakota. Hardly any land has been settled, or even claimed. They live in a surveyor's house, which is stocked to the gills with food. And we meet the Boasts. Mr & Mrs Boast are newly married and happen upon the Ingalls during a snowstorm. Of course the Ingalls bring them in for a hearty meal to wait out the snow. Come the Spring, Charles goes to the land office and puts in his claim on the land by the Big Slough (pronounced "slew"). And we see Mr. Edwards again! He helps out Pa at the land office.  We get our first look at DeSmet, Dakota Territory.

The Long Winter is our next book. The opening chapters, we get a feeling that something is not quite right. It reads a bit differently than the earlier novels, as though the memories of that time were strong in Laura's mind when she put pencil to paper. We meet a grown Almanzo Wilder early on in this novel, when Laura and Carrie are taking a "short cut" to find Pa in the field.

This winter is very different from many others we have read about up to this point. Always the family has had plenty of supplies to see them through the cold and the snow. In this book, the family faces the very real horror of starvation. Not written about in a frightening manner, of course, but as adults we are able to see through the simple language and imagine the realities of their lives.

Almanzo and his brother Royal come to the rescue, making a daring trip to a farm rumored to have grain to sell. They bring back enough for everyone in town to make flour out of and, thus, bread, and survive the winter. We learn of Pa & Ma's resourcefulness. Pa figures out how to twist hay into hard knots that will burn longer and hotter than loose hay, and he teaches Laura, Ma and Mary how to make them. The fire is a hungry beast that must never go out.

But, of course, Spring must come, and with it the trains and barrels of food and goods.

Next is Little Town on the Prairie. The cover is a sweet one of four girls holding a little kitten. That little kitten played an important role on the farm. We forget these days, what a nuisance mice were. There were no refrigerators to keep foods in. No plastic wrap or Tupperware to protect foods. Things sat out with maybe a screen over them, or were locked up in a cupboard--many of which developed mysterious little holes in the back. One of the first stories in this book is Pa Ingalls waking up in the middle of the night with a mouse snipping his hair to make a nest.  There is a meeting among some of the farmers to discuss the problem, and the cat that just gave birth to a litter becomes a hot commodity.

Kitty comes to the farm!  And Laura goes to work helping a townswoman make shirts for the "menfolk" who don't have a woman to do such things. She earns all of nine dollars, and what a grand sum it was for a 14 year old girl! Mary goes away to school. We learn what it took to create a single dress as Ma and the girls make an entire wardrobe for Mary to take with her. Laura is left in charge of the homestead and her sisters while Pa & Ma take Mary to the school for the blind in Iowa.

We meet Almanzo's sister Eliza Jane again. All grown up, a woman in her own right with a homestead claim. She becomes the teacher at the school. There is a great deal of friction in this book, as Eliza Jane doesn't seem to be able to manage the kids. And Nellie Olsen returns.

We learn of societal fads and technological inventions of the time. Name cards become the rage, and the older students and young adults fuss over them. Laura does get a set, and trades a card with Almanzo as he gives her a ride back to the school house. The first buggy/wagon ride they share.  By the end of the book, he is escorting her home from the town Literaries. Laura attends a Ladies Aid Dime Social and a birthday party for a school friend. At the birthday party, we are shown the miracle of electricity and its use in the telegraph.

The telephone hadn't been invented yet. Houses used kerosene lamps and burned coal right in the heating stove. Today, we cannot imagine living without electricity, our telephones, and gas on tap in the stove. The Ingalls family could not yet fathom these things we consider basic necessities of life.

The final chapters bring a tremendous surprise for the family as a homesteader from twelve miles away approaches Laura to come teach in his community's school. He had seen her performance of reciting half of the history of the United States of America at the School Exhibition.

These Happy Golden Years is a grown up story about a girl suddenly finding herself a young woman. It opens with Laura being driven in a sled to the home in which she will stay while teaching the Brewster School.  Pa gives her a sage piece of advice--to think before you speak. I sometimes still have trouble with that one myself. lol Through chapters of description, our adult minds are able to see between the lines of how horrid it must have been for Laura at the Brewster house. We have all dealt with sullen, unhappy people who are only happy when they're quarreling. We have all felt the stab of homesickness, the relief of coming home again.

Small, fifteen year old Laura is in charge of a school. Still a schoolgirl herself and at least two of her students were older than she. Back then, to be a teacher, all you had to do was pass a test and be 16 years of age. (The superintendent didn't ask her age.) And schooling was not yet mandatory. Out on the prairie, to have a school nearby was a luxury.

Almanzo escorts her home in his sled every Friday and takes her back every Sunday for the whole two months. However, their courtship doesn't really start until she's home for good, and sees all the couples whizzing by in sleds, and she's told Almanzo she was only going with him to get home and not because she was liking him. Silly girl.

Sled rides become buggy rides and, as we remember from Farmer Boy, Almanzo is a horse-man. Through the course of their courtship, he purchases and trains several horses. Nellie Olsen tries to horn in, but we see plainly enough that Almanzo doesn't really like her all that much. Almanzo also teaches Laura how to drive the team, and the craziest horse in town marches proudly with her holding the reins.

Laura takes on a job working in a dress shop. Through her hard work, she earns various clothing items.  We learn that hoop skirts are back in fashion...and that an engagement ring went on the index finger of the left hand, not the third finger. Get out the tissues for Laura's last night at home before she marries Almanzo. You're gonna need them!

The First Four Years...Is precisely that. Almanzo promises Laura that if they've not made a success of farming in four years, he will quit and do whatever she wants. These are some hard years, with very human tragedies. The greatest joy is the birth of Rose. But we see a darker side of the Boasts. Remember them from earlier novels? They've been great friends of the Ingalls since By the Shores of Silver Lake, and settled around DeSmet as well. But they have remained childless.  We are shocked when Mr. Boast offers Almanzo and Laura any horse from their barn if they would give him Rose. We don't hear much of the Boasts after this.

Diphtheria descends and Almanzo and Laura become so ill that Rose goes to live with Pa and Ma Ingalls. Crop failures, debts, fire on the prairie, Almanzo has a stroke trying to work too hard after the illness, the loss of their son conceived too soon after the illness...Laura and Almanzo lose their home. What else could go wrong? In the end, Laura gives him a fifth year. Their herd of sheep are doing well, having doubled in short order. All they need is that one good crop.

Rose Wilder Lane

Born 1886
Series Author Roger MacBride

I was absolutely thrilled to have the first book of Rose's series come into my hands. At the time, I was working Inventory Control for a Multi-Department pop culture store, which meant I personally touched every item in the store. I reached into a box, grabbed a handful of books and started sorting them up onto the Children's cart, and my eyes hit this cover. My heart stopped. My breath caught in my throat. I nearly cried.  lol I'm nearly in tears right now remembering that moment.

Roger MacBride, the author of Rose's story, was her sole heir and very dear friend. He heard these stories many times over until her death in 1969. Yes, the voice of these books is a different.  Rose is not Laura. Of course she will think differently, express herself differently. You must expect that these books are not going to be carbon copies of Laura's original series. These were written half a century later, about a different person, in a different area of the country, and about an entirely different era. Laura grew to womanhood in the infancy of the railroad crawling foot by foot across the country. Rose grew to womanhood at the turn of the century, when it was becoming more acceptable for a woman to make her own way in the world.

You are warned! In one of these books, Charles Ingalls dies.

Little House on Rocky Ridge begins in De Smet. Laura and Almanzo have continued to have horrible luck with their farm. One crop after another failed for one reason or another, and now they have no choice. They must go elsewhere to try to eek out their living.  They are not alone, another family choosing to go along with them to Missouri. The journey is not an easy one, and you can more readily envision the dangers through Rose's eyes. Meeting strangers and not being sure of their intentions. The hope of arrival is shattered when the precious $100 bill Laura had hidden in her writing desk comes up missing. Rose is, of course, questioned to no end, and you can feel her anxiety and guilt though she's done nothing wrong. And it is she who saves the day, finding the bill had slipped down the crack between two pieces of wood in the desk. Laura and Almanzo buy their land with baby apple trees ready for planting. Hundreds of them that have to be hand planted and won't produce a single crop for years.  Yet another hope for the future. And you cannot help but remember the failed Tree Claim in South Dakota.

Book 2: Little Farm in the Ozarks
Rose goes to school for the first time in Missouri. And quickly discovers she's about the smartest kid in class. Bored out of her gourd, she soon gets Mama (Laura) to let her skip now and then (or often lol). She's not fitting in well, too smart and sharp for her own good, and many frustrations soon become evident. She reminded me a lot of myself around age 7.

Book 3: Land of the Big Red Apple
Papa is building Mama a new house!!! Apple trees are planted, they're growing...and in a few more years there will be an apple harvest of their own. And to help her get to school, Rose is given a donkey. Spookendyke, as she names him, turns out to be more of a tagalong, however. He doesn't like to be ridden any more than she likes to ride him.

Book 4: On the Other Side of the Hill
when I read this one again, I'll update it

Book 5: Little Town in the Ozarks
A familiar theme in all the books...Times get tough due to droughts and cyclones and all other manner of natural disasters. The Wilder family has to move to town. One of the moments I remember most in this book is when Mama scolds Rose for (basically) being herself. They're in the barn together, having this discussion, Mama is NOT happy with Rose. And when company shows up, Mama's voice changes to a pleasantry on the spot. Rose is frustrated by this, not understanding this very grown up way of not showing the neighbors the family laundry. As my daughter grows up, I find myself remembering this, remembering how Rose felt in that moment.

Book 6: New Dawn on Rocky Ridge
Rose is 13 years old and New Years Eve brings the dawn of a new century. The year is 1900 and she is fascinated by technology...and Paul. Her childhood friend Paul seems so grown up to her. They talk of a future together. He's older than she is, and leaves for Iowa and a job as a telegrapher.

Book 7: On the Banks of the Bayou
Rose has gone as far in her local school as is possible. 10th Grade. Almanzo's sister Eliza Jane has an extraordinary offer. Rose can finish school and graduate. All she has to do is go to Louisiana with her Aunt for a school year or so. It's not an easy decision to leave home, but Rose shows what an intrepid explorer she will  become and takes the plunge. This is a terrific look at what a privilege going to school was back then, what it meant to finish  High School and  have a diploma. Rose's hardest task is to make up four years of Latin in one year. She has to in order to graduate, and throws herself into her studies with great gusto. I won't tell you what place she graduates in.

Book 8: Bachelor Girl
The exploration begins with a huge move to San Francisco. School Girl Rose quickly grows up. She completes a very strange course in telegraphy and gets herself a job. We learn a bit about societal propriety of the day, and Rose meets her future husband. You never knew what a party animal Rose could be!

Caroline Quiner Ingalls
Born 1839

Author of Series Celia Wilkins

Book 1: Little House in Brookfield
We meet Caroline and her family not long after her father has died. It is a sad time for young Caroline, of course, and we learn how difficult it can be to scratch out a living without a strong man on the farm. As an adult, I can readily relate to the Mother's situation. This is the mid 1800's. Women couldn't vote and were still considered property of their husbands. We've come a long way, baby!

Book 2: Little Clearing in the Woods
Book 3: Little Town At the Crossroads
Book 4: On Top of Concord Hill

Book 5: Across the Rolling River
The first book you've been waiting for! Young Caroline meets her Destiny. Young Charles Ingalls, already the best fiddle player in the land. We see shadows of his future self. Not so sure such conversations were actually held, but it keeps the character consistent.

Book 6: Little City by the Lake
This was one of my favorite stories. Caroline receives the opportunity of a lifetime...Continued education at a girl's finishing school in Milwaukee! If you ever wondered how Ma Ingalls could take a few nothing ingredients and turn out a wonderful meal, HERE is where she learned it! Here is where she had her first taste of fine clothing and parties...and the attentions of young men. Not to mention snobbery.

Book 7: A House of Their Own
The second book you've been waiting for! Charles and Caroline marry. Nuf said.

Charlotte Tucker Quiner Born 1809
Series Author Melissa Wiley
Book 1: Little House by Boston Bay
Book 2: On Tide Mill Lane
Book 3: Road from Roxbury
Book 4: Across the Puddingstone Dam

Martha Morse Tucker Born 1782
Series Author Melissa Wiley
Book 1:  Little House in the Highlands
Book 2: The Far Side of the Loch
Book 3: Down by the Bonny Glen
Book 4: Beyond the Heather Hills

To be continued...

Due to size restraints, this Guide is soon going to have to be split into two.