ExclusiveRose Wilder Lane: The Woman Behind the Little House Legacy

Welcome to American Legends. My name is Tiffany Brannon. Each culture has its legends, and that could be myths or different stories, but here in America, our greatest legends are the wonderful heroes who are right from our history pages. Now, some of these heroes are very famous and some are obscure, but each person deserves to be discovered because each man or woman stands as a great example of how we can be better Americans The idea that the works of a famous author may have been penned by somebody else is an intriguing one, which continues to inspire theories and musings. It's especially intriguing if the presumed ghostwriter may have been a close relative of the famous author in question. One of the most famous children's fiction authors of historical reputation is Laura Engels Wilder. Her Little House on the Prairie series captured the spirit of the pioneers during the mid to late 19th century, and it has reached a wider audience through screen adaptations such as the popular NBC series from the 1970s through 80s. It's known that Laura Engels Wilder's daughter, Rose, was her encourager and sometimes helped edit her writing since she herself was a prolific and varied published author long before her mother was. However, did she do more than just encourage? Rose Wilder was born on December 5th, 1886, just north of De Smet in the Dakota Territory. Her parents were the 19-year-old Laura Engels and her husband Almanzo Wilder, both coming from homesteading families themselves. The newly married couple, who'd been married about a year and a half by the time their daughter was born, spent their life, especially during Rose's childhood, moving around a lot, as both their parents had, trying to find the best place to call home, as they dealt with challenges in farming, sometimes financial reverses, droughts, economic downturns, and the personal health problems. They had a second child, a son, who died within 12 days of his birth. Thus, Rose was the only child they had who lived to adulthood. During her childhood, the Wilders moved frequently, spending time in Minnesota, Florida, with Almanzo's parents for a while, and Missouri. They eventually settled on a homestead in Mansfield, Missouri, on a property which they named Rocky Ridge. Rose didn't inherit her parents' pioneer spirit. She wasn't too keen on having to move around so much, and the hardships that the family endured because of homesteading, and just the challenges of that life. Even though things were arguably not as tough for her as they had been for either of her parents during their childhood, she didn't like how much they had to move around, how hard it was to establish a farm, and the fact that she didn't have very good education. She didn't do particularly well at the local school, in sort of the one-room schoolhouse, so she didn't go there too often. In her later teenage years, she went to live with her paternal aunt in Crowley, Louisiana, to go to high school there. That was her first taste of a bigger city, and she enjoyed getting to have that more formal schooling there. She excelled at Latin, taking three years' worth in one year, and she graduated in 1904. From there, she wasn't able to go to college because of her family's financial situation, so instead she set off on her own to become a working girl, first heading to Kansas City, where she became a telegraph operator. For the next few years, she moved around quite a bit, including going back to Mansfield for a while, and mainly working as a telegraph operator, but also as a secretary and in a few other odd jobs she could find. Looking back on her childhood, Rose respected her parents' resilience, although she had to admit that she didn't share their optimistic outlook on life. She said, "...my father and mother were courageous, even gaily so. They did everything possible to make me happy, and I gaily responded with an effort to persuade them that they were succeeding. But all unsuspected, I lived through a childhood that was a nightmare." A good deal of that nightmare clearly was in Rose's own mind, as throughout her life she struggled with chronic depression and melancholy. She was more of a, as literary people tend to be, sort of a free spirit who was curious about different ideas, but wasn't able to have just that endless resilience. And I think that Rose's background shows that it's not just people who have it too easy growing up who can develop that mindset, because clearly she grew up in that same tough pioneer way, but she didn't take to it the way that her parents had. But I think her ability to travel the world and try so many different things, and ultimately succeed at them, was something that she learned from her parents, seeing how even though she personally didn't enjoy it, she was part of their endeavors to just keep starting again, no matter how many times they failed. And she herself, in her own career, was determined to not just make the best of a situation if it wasn't going well, because she said if that had been the case, she probably would have just stayed in Mansfield, and she didn't want to do that. So eventually she made her way to San Francisco, and there she became a reporter. This was pretty early for a woman to be a reporter, but there were some female writers at this point. So she began writing for a series of publications, and in various different styles of writing. In 1909, she married another writer and a real estate salesman, Claire Gillette Lane. That is a man, despite the fact that his first name is Claire. And they were married for nine years. They didn't have the happiest marriage, and they too struggled financially, even as they lived in the more metropolis San Francisco, partly because Claire also was not one to just make the best of things. And I think as opposed to the Ingalls or the Wilders, who moved around a lot, partly because they had to, and because their crops would just plain fail, or there would be a locust plague, the Lane family had a tendency to just try different things and move around because they were discontent. And also they just weren't particularly good at some of the things they did. For instance, at one point, both Rose and Claire were selling real estate. And Rose quickly proved to be much better at selling real estate than her husband was. During their marriage, they had one child who was either stillborn or died very early in infancy. She didn't talk or write a lot about this. The main references to it were in a few letters consoling some friends who had lost a child. So the child may have been born alive and lived for a little while, but in any case, the baby died very young. And because of a surgery she had to have shortly after that, Rose was unable to bear any more children. They ended up getting divorced in 1918, which was rather unusual at the time. And it was quite amicable, but despite the fact that their marriage was quite short-lived, Rose kept his surname for the rest of her life, being Rose Wilder Lane, for all intents and purposes. This could be because she had really gotten her start as a writer during her marriage, and thus that was her established byline, and she didn't want to change it. In the late teens, Rose began working for the Red Cross in Washington, D.C. And in that capacity, she traveled the world to assess the situation in the wake of World War I and to write reports on what she discovered throughout Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. She visited all of the United States, a good deal of Canada, basically every country in Europe except Spain, and a lot of Middle Eastern countries. Through these vast experiences, she produced a wide variety of writings. She wrote both fiction and non-fiction. She wrote a few novels, she wrote some pamphlets, she wrote articles for Woman's Day, writing about topics as diverse as the importance of individual freedom and needlework, sometimes both in the same article. Although it might sound like she was a bit of a modern woman, Rose was still at heart quite a traditionalist. But it's interesting to see how her political views changed over time. As far back as high school, mind you, this is, you know, years before women even had the right to vote in most places, she was very interested in the politics of the day, and she was quite supportive of a socialist who was running for president. For the next 10 plus years, she dabbled in some socialist ideas, and through her reading and personal education, as she taught herself several languages and educated herself as much as she could, she explored these different ideas. Interestingly, the thing that cured her of her sympathy for socialism or communism was visiting Russia in the days shortly following the Bolshevik Revolution. And it's one thing to philosophically believe that socialism or communism might be the best way to establish a government, but it's another to see it being enacted with cruelty and failure in real life, as she witnessed in Russia. And after a short time there, when she returned to the United States, she was a fully reformed communist, and she became a very outspoken supporter of everything American in terms of personal freedom, liberty, individualism, and even this semi-anarchistic system which is capitalism. Comparing the flawed designs of the new Soviet Union with the rugged and challenging but ultimately liberating childhood she'd experienced, and seeing how her parents had the right to set up their own homestead even with how difficult it was, that was what they wanted to do and they were able to do it. So she really became very pro-individual freedom. And she's considered one of the early proponents of the libertarian party. Some have called her like the grandmother of libertarianism, since she was really neither pro-Republican nor pro-Democrat, just pro-freedom. And some of her writings on this topic are considered the foundation of libertarianism. She had a great impact on many people who would make important decisions politically and would become very influential writers themselves, either through her novels, her pamphlets, her articles, but perhaps even more so through her personal letters. She would have lengthy correspondences with anyone who wanted to debate these topics with her or just compare ideas. For instance, after one public radio debate on New Deal policies in the 1930s, she wrote letters to every one of these New Deal politicians, since she disagreed with the idea behind it, and only one responded. So for quite a while they exchanged letters and then suddenly he stopped writing to her, so she figured she'd lost him. But a few decades later, she saw an article by this man who had gotten much more into politics and he said that everything that had shaped his ideas at this point could really be owed to those letters they had exchanged, how much that had influenced him. The idea that Rose may have been her mother's ghost writer could be traced to one biography of Rose Wilder Lane, which is called The Ghost in the Little House. And this biography is quite controversial because in it the author basically says that Rose edited her mother's writing to such a great extent that she should be considered at least a co-author, if not like really the author of the whole thing. Now why would Rose have her, because she submitted it herself, why would she have her mother's name be on it? Because it's a better story. But I think if we look a little deeper into the whole background of the book, and the books really, you can see that it doesn't make much sense that Rose would have actually written or even co-written the books. As far back as 1911, Laura Ingalls Wilder was writing a column for a farm magazine, several different publications. She wrote different articles and submissions and we see from their letters that Rose encouraged her greatly in this writing, but it doesn't appear that she really acted as any kind of editor for these articles. As Laura and Almonso were nearing retirement age, Laura was looking for something a bit more stable to give them a good annuity, if you will, and at this point Rose seems to have encouraged her mother in the late 1920s to try her hand at writing her memoirs. And the result of this was a first draft called Pioneer Girl. From the letters we see that Rose would compare notes with her mother and sort of help her condense all her different ideas and thoughts into something that could be a more compact manuscript, which makes sense since Rose had written many books at this point and had done a lot of editing and she had reviewed books. She was a literary reviewer for several different publications. She was also a biographer, a very controversial one I might add, as many of either her subjects or her subjects' relatives sued her. She definitely helped her get all her thoughts combined and into place, especially in the first draft of Pioneer Girl. And then she helped her submit her work because she was the one who had the literary connections to publishers. Does that mean that she was the co-author or edited the works to the extent that they can't really be considered Laura's? I don't think that's true. I think that basically everyone whose book has been published has dealt with an editor, usually a rather impartial editor, who doesn't care that much about the writer's original vision or story, who just cares about creating a marketable good. Rose, on the other hand, had grown up hearing her mother's and father's stories. She had been raised in that environment, she knew her grandparents personally, she knew her aunts, and she herself spent a lot of time growing up in that environment of homesteading and prairie life. So I think that she could have easily guided, encouraged, and inspired her mother to keep going without restricting her thoughts. I think all the ideas are Laura's. If anything, they may have been smoothed and packaged for better literary presentation by Rose. They definitely were a good team. And if nothing else, Rose deserves a lot of credit for encouraging her mother to write. Because obviously, as someone very involved with publishing and writing, Rose realized that her mother had something to say with her story, and that her story was one that should be shared. It was one that people should read, and they should know more about how inspiring that spirit was. Especially as she herself was in her 40s by that point, I think that Rose probably could look back with more maturity and objectivity toward her childhood. In her later days, Rose returned to that spirit of homesteading in that she was a very vocal opponent of zoning laws as they began to be debated and then implemented in her community, because she saw that they were completely contradictory to the kind of staking your claim homesteading spirit which her parents had had, and that opportunity. And certainly, if we look at our world today, although there were numerous challenges facing hardship, disease, and even death, the idea that you could just go and stake your claim is a bit refreshing considering how expensive land is these days, and that American spirit of wanting to claim something and build it yourself. Rose didn't want anything to come in the way of that, and she obviously didn't really succeed in her opposition of zoning or social security, but I think she did make people think through her writing, and she influenced many people who came after her. If you want to find out more about Rose herself, in addition to reading works about her, perhaps the best way is to read works by her. There's a long list of works she published, which you can find for free online at places like Project Gutenberg, both her fiction and her non-fiction writing. You can also learn more about her earliest days through the last book in the Little House series, which is called The First Four Years, and was published posthumously in 1971. Rose Wilder Lane died in 1968, just 11 years after her mother. Then again, she was only 19 years younger than her mother, and she was still very active at the time of her death, as she was currently planning another three-year tour of Vietnam. She was active until the end, writing, touring, speaking, being involved with the Red Cross and many different publications, since she never wanted to just sit still. She always had that active pioneer spirit to conquer new lands, oftentimes across the seas, and to continue inspiring people with the ideas of liberty through her writing. Rose Wilder Lane certainly does not have the fame that her mother has, and none of her works achieved that kind of lasting impact. Yet, her literary output is worth rediscovering, as is her life story, because of its important place in the overall Little House series. Some of the spin-off series of Little House on the Prairie have talked about Rose's life. For instance, there was a series which is considered the Rose series of a few books that was written by her surrogate grandson, and it was to him that she left the rights to the Little House series when she died. Through her different writing and her life story, Rose Wilder Lane deserves a place alongside her mother as one of America's legends. Thank you for spending this time with me, and I hope you'll join me next time for more American Legends.