Laura Ingalls Wilder biography

Synopsis

Early Life

On February 7, 1867, Laura Wilder was born to Charles and Caroline Ingalls in their log cabin just outside of Pepin, Wisconsin. In her books, Wilder would later come to call the cabin “The Little House in the Big Woods.” She was one of four children. She had an older sister named Mary; two younger sisters, Carrie and Grace; and a younger brother named Charles, who died at nine months old.

Wilder described her early years as “full of sunshine and shadow.” When she was growing up, she and her pioneer family repeatedly moved from one Midwestern town to the next. In 1874 they moved from Wisconsin to Walnut Grove, Minnesota. Although the Ingalls family initially stayed in Walnut Grove for only two years before a failed crop forced them to move to Burr Oak, Iowa, Walnut Grove became the setting of Little House on the Prairie (1974–1982), a television show based on Laura Wilder’s life.

In the autumn of 1877, the Ingalls family returned to Walnut Grove. In 1879, they moved yet again, becoming homesteaders in the Dakota Territory, and eventually settling in De Smet, South Dakota.

Teaching

Because they had moved so often, Wilder and her siblings mainly taught themselves and each other. They attended local schools whenever they could. To Wilder, it seemed only logical to pursue her own teaching degree as early as possible. In 1882 she passed the test to obtain her teaching certificate.

Just 15 years old, she began teaching in a one-room country schoolhouse 12 miles from her parents’ home. She held the job for three years, rooming with a local family. During that time, her parents often sent a family friend named Almanzo Wilder to pick her up and bring her home for weekend visits.

Marriage and Children

Over the course of their wagon rides home, Laura and Almanzo fell in love. On August 25, 1885, the two were married at a congregational church in South Dakota. Afterward, Laura quit teaching to raise children and help Almanzo work the farm. In the winter of 1886, Laura gave birth to a daughter, Rose. In August of 1889 she had a son who tragically died within a month of his birth. Not long after, Almanzo contracted diphtheria and was partially paralyzed. To make matters worse, in 1890, the Wilders’ home burned down to the ground.

After four years of drifting from place to place, in 1894 the Wilders bought a 200-acre farm in the Ozarks of Mansfield, Missouri. On Rocky Ridge Farm, as they came to call it, the Wilders built a farmhouse, raised livestock and did all their own farm work.

Writing

In the 1910s Wilder’s daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, by then grown up and a reporter for the San Francisco Bulletin, encouraged her to write about her childhood.