The Ingalls family would suffer two grasshopper plagues that would take out two years of crops, their oldest daughter becoming seriously ill and then becoming blind, and enduring the brutal winter of 1880-81 in De Smet, South Dakota, where the town's residents almost starved to death. It was here the family, reeling from the death of a young son (not included in the books) and resulting medical and other bills, became so desperate they fled the town and their unpaid bills in the middle of the night. Wilder would insist that her father had paid his bills without any help from the government, but the sad reality was that sometimes he was not able to do so and could have benefitted from some of those government programs. It's not that I expected Wilder to chronicle every move the family made in her first 15 years, or every disaster that befell them. But I would have appreciated more honesty about some of these moves being really bad choices or about the lack of character displayed when they hit rock bottom in a little town in Iowa. Recently, the PBS television network aired their new American Masters episode entitled 'Laura Ingalls Wilder: From Prairie to Page.' It revealed many unsettling facts about Wilder, Lane and the Little House books that made me question the integrity of the writers and their books' contents and have forever changed how I view these books I loved as a child.

Little house on the prairie book series