Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose

Like most little girls I grew up loving the Little House Books. One summer I read through them voraciously wanting to know what adventure Laura was experiencing next. I was also convinced beyond a doubt that my grandmother was the real Laura Ingalls. She grew up in a cabin on a farm in rural Missouri and walked through the woods to school while playing stump tag with her brothers and sisters. They all bathed every Saturday night and rode in a wagon to church on Sunday. The irrefutable proof of her secret identity was she had taught in a one room school before she married my grandfather. She even told me once that she went to work early to earn 5 extra bucks a month by lighting the wood burning stove every morning before lessons. How could she not be for me the embodiment of everything I had read about in those books?

As I grew older and became more aware that my grandmother was not the author of the pioneer narratives I begged her to write her own books. I was convinced that my grandmother would be as beloved as Laura. My grandmother, as so many matriarchs before her, left only an oral tradition behind that my cousins and I still share with one another when we are together with the classic first sentence, "Remember that one time grandma..." Those words are like magic when all 25 of the first cousins are assembled. We hush and look at the storyteller waiting for the jewels of our childhood collective memory to be retold.

For some reason my psyche bound the character of these two women together. This inexplicably connection made me feel protective of the reputation of the amazing woman who wrote books that I love to this day. This idolizing of Laura Ingalls Wilder was then shaken when at a university lecture a visiting professor suggested that Rose Wilder Lane was the actual ghost writer behind the books. Somehow, it felt like he was throwing rocks at the integrity of my heroes. The man, William Holtz, did eventually publish a book, The Ghost in the Little House: the Life of Rose Wilder Lane (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=The+ghost+in+the+lit). His end thesis was less strident, suggesting instead that Rose, strongly edited her mother's work and developed the narrative to the stories we all know and love. I am still finding this to be a large pill to swallow. I want to believe in the romance that Laura Ingalls Wilder did her own writing, but I think there is some truth in Holtz argument. A truth apparent after I read Travels with Zenobia: Paris to Albania by Model T Ford, the journals of Rose and her friend Helen Dore Boylston as they traveled across Europe in 1926, edited by Holtz. Rose's writing is indeed worthy of the epic Little House series. And in the end I console myself with the thought that it is unimportant who is responsible for the actual written word. What is important to me is that Laura Ingalls Wilder lives and walks in my imagination and is often accompanied with the spirit of my own much loved and much missed grandmother. (A dignified photograph of an elder Laura Ingalls Wilder at top on left, A young Rose Wilder Lane at the bottom on right of page)