Carrie, the third-born, was thin and sickly. Her elder sister, Mary, had gone blind after an illness diagnosed as “brain fever,” which may have been caused by measles or meningitis. By that time, she was helping to support her family by teaching school (she was younger than some of her students) and working as a part-time seamstress. They barely made it back, in a whiteout, but they saved their neighbors from starvation.Īlmanzo and Laura started courting when she was fifteen. When De Smet was cut off from supplies by a winter of record cold and relentless blizzards that buried the railroad tracks, he and a friend had risked their lives to buy grain from an outlying farmer who was rumored to have a reserve.
Almanzo Wilder, whom she called Manly, had raised horses as a farm boy in Malone, New York, and he owned the finest team in town-two beautiful brown Morgans. While the Ingallses were living outside the town of De Smet, in what is now South Dakota, Laura met her future husband, a laconic homesteader ten years her senior. Laura Ingalls was born in the sylvan wilds near Pepin, Wisconsin, in 1867, and she grew up on the frontier, in the various log cabins, claim shanties, sod dugouts, and little frame houses that her inveterately restless father, Charles, built for his wife and daughters each time he bundled them into a covered wagon and moved on, mostly westward, in search of an elusive prosperity. In 1930, she sat down with a supply of sharpened pencils-she didn’t type-to write something more ambitious: an autobiography. Wilder, however, wasn’t entirely happy with her part-time career, or with her obscurity. Her sensible opinions on housekeeping, marriage, husbandry, country life, and, more rarely, on politics and patriotism were expressed in a plain style, with an occasional ecstatic flourish inspired by her love for “the sweet, simple things of life which are the real ones after all.” A work ethic inherited from her Puritan forebears, which exalted labor and self-improvement not merely for their material rewards but as moral values, was, she believed, the key to happiness. Readers of The Missouri Ruralist knew her as Mrs. She also enjoyed meetings of her embroidery circle, and of the Justamere Club, a study group that she helped found. The family lived at Rocky Ridge, a farm in the Ozarks, near Mansfield, Missouri, where Wilder raised chickens and tended an apple orchard. Laura Elizabeth Ingalls Wilder was a matron of sixty-five, neat and tiny-about four feet eleven-who was known as Bessie to her husband, Almanzo, and as Mama Bess to her daughter, Rose. In April of 1932, an unlikely literary débutante published her first book. Their daughter, born a year later, was named for the wild roses on the prairie. Laura Ingalls married Almanzo Wilder in 1885.
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