![]() ![]() Alden, saintly in the books, turns out to be “a pious fraud and a cheat.” ![]() Some of the revelations are startling: a wealthy neighbor asks to adopt 10-year old Laura, a sign of the Ingalls family’s severe financial struggles at one point, Pa threatens to skip town without paying rent the real-life Rev. Hill’s meticulous notes, which account for about half of “Pioneer Girl,” provide rich historical context for every setting, incident and character, even minor ones. ![]() The family has to work in a hotel near a saloon in Burr Oak, a “dead town…without even a railroad.” One night, when Laura is 13 and staying with another family to take care of their baby and ill wife, she is awakened by the husband: “I could smell the whiskey on his breath…lie down and be still!’ ‘Go away quick,’ I said, ‘or I will scream for Nannie.’ He went and the next day Ma said I could come home.” The most intriguing part of the manuscript concerns the years the Ingalls family spent in Iowa, omitted from the “Little House” books because the events were too grim, beginning with the death of Laura’s baby brother. Because it was intended for an adult audience, Wilder doesn’t avoid the bleaker side of homesteading: financial woes, affairs, divorces, drunks, domestic violence. It’s episodic and linear, with chapter breaks inserted by Hill. The text of “Pioneer Girl” reads like an outline of the entire “Little House” series (minus “Farmer Boy”) in a sped-up first-draft dash. ![]()
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