Wilder - 3. Daughter Dearest pt. 1: The Hurricane

Episode Date: June 22, 2023

Behind the cozy wholesome sweetness of the Little House books, is a raging mother and daughter relationship that is the stuff of soap operas and tabloid talk shows. Laura Ingalls Wilder and her husband Almanzo had one living child named Rose. That child would go on to be Rose Wilder Lane – one of the most successful, and controversial, freelance writers in the early 20th century. Without her, the Little House books would never have been written. It was also Rose, the world famous writer, scared of being eclipsed by her mothers success, who, overcome with jealousy and resentment, almost derailed the entire Little House series before it even got started. In the first part of this two part episode, we’re going to meet Rose Wilder Lane. Where did she come from? What was her life like? How did she become her mother’s greatest collaborator, and under-miner?    Go deeper: Visit Laura and Rose’s homes in Mansfield Caroline Fraser’s Prairie Fires Follow us for behind the scenes content! @WilderPodcast on TikTok@Wilder_Podcast on InstagramSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Listen to stuff they don't want you to know on the iHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you find your favorite shows. From I Heart Podcasts Supreme, the Battle for Row, tells the story of the unlikely champions behind the landmark case, Row V-Wade, starring Maya Hawk as 26-year-old lead attorney, Sarah Weddington, for challenging the Texas abortion laws and federal court. And Academy Award nominee, William H. Macy,

as Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackman. Time is not the most important factor, getting it right is. Listen to the podcast Supreme, the Battle for Row, on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Rose had no magic, and she knew it. Rose was a hack, but a lot of hacks are really successful. She was a complicated lady. I find Rose is very divisive. You either love her or you don't

like her at all. I find her just so despicable. Most of my personal reaction is to feel sorry for Laura. I'm like, man, this was her companion. She was a bit more hammy and she just didn't think like everybody else did. She's just a kind of lavishly talented, but incredibly frustrating personality. It is amazing, the bad mouth thing that goes on, 50 years after her death. I am so disgusted with that,

because I think Rose was a heroic woman. Lorange's Wilder and her husband Almanzo had one living child named Rose. If you only know Rose from the little house in the Perry books, you don't know much. In the first decades of the 20th century, Rose Wilder Lane was one of the most successful and controversial freelance writers in the country. Rose was such a famous writer in her time. She was so popular. Rose is the reason Laura, a middle-aged farmwife, picked up a pen and started writing about

eggs. Rose told her to. Well, they had a symbiotic relationship related to writing for many, many years. Rose would write her mother and suggest stories that she should work up for the Missouri ruralist or some other Kansas or Missouri newspaper. Rose was also the one who encouraged her mother to do more than write articles about farm life. Rose pushed Laura to write the little house books and was integral to the process. She was wrapped up so closely in pushing her mother to do this writing,

in editing and revising and getting the books published, she has just woven into the whole story in ways that you cannot ignore. And it was Rose, the world famous writer, scared of being eclipsed by her mother's success, who overcome with jealousy and resentment, almost derailed the entire little house series before it even got started? Behind the cozy wholesome sweetness of the little house books is a raging mother and daughter relationship

that is the stuff of soap operas and tabloid talk shows. I mean people in Mansfield still there's still memories about this hanging around in Mansfield. That's how big a deal it was. But how did it get to this point? As far as Little House readers know, Rose only appears in the first four years, the last and least well known of the books. As the title suggests, the first four years

covers Laura's first four years of marriage to Almanzo. Rose arrives in the second year, a happy and healthy baby. She's named after the Prairie Rose's Laura loves so much. A rose in December was much rarer than a rose in June. Christmas was at hand, and Rose was a grand present. It's a sweet loving description that comes in the middle of a very odd off-putting book. Unlike the rest of the Little House series, the first four years is not an enjoyable read. Yeah, it is jarring and I remember that same feeling reading it as a kid. Like, what is this? Where did this come from?

It's jarring because the first four years is an unannoted manuscript. It was never meant to see the light of day. It was nevertheless published after both Laura and Rose had died. And yet, the first four years might be the most pivotal book in the Little House series. Written by Laura in the aftermath of an epic implosion in Laura and Rose's relationship. It eventually launched a decades-long conspiracy theory over the authorship of the Little House books. If you look at all the available information, and you look at Laura's writing, and you look at Rose Wilder Lane's writing, Rose Wilder Lane wrote the book. Rose is woven into the Little House creation story in ways you can't ignore.

However you feel about her, there is no question that more than Laura's editors, more than Garth Williams who later illustrated the books, Rose is responsible for the Little House series. But who was she really? In the first part of this two-part episode, we're going to meet Rose Wilder Lane. Where did she come from? What was her life like?

How did she become her mother's greatest collaborator and under minor? Buckle up. I'm Glenis McNickel, and this is part one of Rose Wilder Lane. you The thing about Rose Wilder Lane is her life story is the stuff of Hollywood. And the fact she hasn't been given the Hollywood treatment is a bit strange when you consider how much Hollywood loves adventure, drama, and scandal. Like any classic American tale, Rose had humble, small town beginnings.

This is the last house built by Charles Ingalls. He built this house in 1887 and the family moved in on Christmas Eve. Emily and I are in Dismott, South Dakota, a tiny town on the eastern side of the state surrounded by rolling farmland. Dismott is a setting of the last five little house books and we're touring the Ingles home. It's a beautiful two story house, not far from Dismott's main street.

At some point, it was inhabited by all of the Ingles, except for Laura, who was already married to Almanzo by the time Charles built this house. This is a photograph of Laura and now Manzo shortly after they were married in 1885. They had their daughter Rose on December 5th of 1886, and then their luck kind of ran out for a little while. It was during this difficult time for the wilders that Rose lived here in this house. Amanda Laura Cogniz, the area, which was a very common disease at the time. While they were recovering, their daughter Rose stayed here with her grandparents and the original better upstairs became Rose's room.

Despite the short time she spent here, Rose featured prominently in our tour. Even from stories about her as a baby, evidence of her strong personality is present. This is a photograph of Rose when she was young. If you look closely, you'll see that she's wearing a ring in this photograph. The photographer did not watch her to be wearing this ring, so whenever he would pose her for her portrait, he would have her hand cover up the ring. But whenever he would fill behind the sheet to take the photo she would always switch her hands back. Even as a child she was very strong-willed and independent. She grew up into be quite the strong-willed independent adult. Because so little is known about Rose outside her minimal presence

in the books, the truth of Rose's early years can come as quite a shock to readers, who only know her as the sweet baby Laura wrote about. But Rose was a force of nature, and her story is at least as wild as Laura's. If not more so. I talked Joe through her basic bio. Well, walk me through, just walk me through her early childhood and her life and just like, I want to hear about Rose before she became Rose. Right. Right.

So, she was born in 1886 in Dismat South Dakota, which we've been to because that's where Laura lived. Laura was only 19 when she got pregnant. They'd only been married. They'd only been seven babies. Her'd only been married. Baby seven babies. Hernaumando had seven babies. Babies having babies. Hernaumando had only been married for one year.

Shortly after Rose is born, Laurenaumando get dipsyria. Aumando has a stroke. He's partially paralyzed. Their crops fail. They lose their house. They lose all their money. Laura has a baby boy who dies a few weeks after birth. Their house burns down.

Like it's a very traumatic early childhood. And they were very poor, right? Poor. They're so poor that for her whole life Rose had terrible teeth. She was very resentful of that. She's a very, very smart kid. Like she's very smart from a young age. And right around the age of eight,

they see an advertisement for the Ozarks, the land of apples, and they decide to move to the Ozarks. So they take, they know, they go to the Ozarks with $1,100 bill. They get to the Ozarks and buy this land, but it's called Rocky Ridge because it's full of rocks. It takes years to clear and years to be self-sufficient.

They're deeply, deeply poor. Rose is dressed in, I wouldn't say regs, but she's not dressed well. She's so aware of this when she goes to school, the class discrepancy of how smart she is and how poor she looks. And sometime in high school, she's so advanced that her mother sends her off to live with Eliza Jane, Almanzo's sister. As much as Rose hated Mansfield and resented her mother and adored her father, she always wanted to leave Mansfield. She could never help.

She was always coming back. She was always coming home. She went to high school at the Liza Jane, comes back. But there's some sense, and of course, these things are hard to gauge, but there is some sensing Caroline Fraser's book that Rose may have been, I mean, I'm using loaded words here,

but these are the words that I think would have been attached to her at the time. She was like, perhaps a little promiscuous that she, you know, liked boys and was maybe a little risky for, I mean, my God, can you imagine what small town Ozarks would like that would have been so strange? I think Rose and Laura had an extremely fraught relationship from very early on. Because as a mother, I imagine there's a lot of guilt

to not being able to provide your daughter with certain things or not knowing how to handle her. And Laura was a teen mom. Yes, yeah. They're so poor. She's got a husband with a disability. Laura's been working since the age of nine and she has a daughter who is a lot to handle.

So we know from Laura writing about herself that she had a temper. She was very candid about that when she wrote about her childhood in the Little House series. And she was headstrong. And I think you see that in Rose. You see that sort of aggressiveness in the controlling nature. Caroline Fraser's book, Parry Fires, she writes extensively about rows, and Caroline writes, you know, yes, Laura had a temper, but Laura was willing to acknowledge that temper, but Laura was able to recognize her flaws and rows seemed unable.

laws and Rose seemed unable. Yeah, I imagine them butting heads, right? You have these two strong, ambitious, smart, ahead of their time, women who, you know, I could already see it happening with my own daughter. Like, when you have these two strong personalities, I think it becomes very difficult. Rose, which I think we can both relate to, got the hell out of Mansfield, Missouri,

as soon as she could. She met a man called Gillette Lane. Like this is the least surprising thing, a man named Gillette Lane. He's a confidence man, which is the old man. A con man. They were married for, technically, they were married for a while, and they had a tumultuous marriage. They were, you know, itinerant, always trying to pull together scams might be.

Denner probably cons. Fun. Yeah, probably cons. And Rose became pregnant and then had a stillbirth and a very, very difficult stillbirth that made it impossible for her to have children after that and was ill for quite some like in the hospital for quite a long time. And eventually their marriage falls apart. She goes to San Francisco on her own in right about 1915. She would have been in 1915, she would have been almost 30. She falls for divorce, which in 1915, even in San Francisco is...

Standless. Not a small thing, yeah. And right around this time, Rose is alone in San Francisco, and she writes Laura, this incredibly endearing letter, and asking Laura to come to San Francisco and she writes Laura, this incredibly endearing letter, and asking Laura to come to San Francisco and visit her. She says, Dearest Mama Bess,

which is what she called Laura her whole life, because Almondso called Laura Bess. And so the fact that Rose includes her first name sort of as like, she sees her mother as a bit of a contemporary, even from a young age, but Dearest Mama Bess, her first name sort of is like, she sees her mother as a bit of a contemporary, even from a young age, but... Dearest mama best, I simply can't stand being so homesick for you anymore.

You must plan to come out here in July, or at latest August. You've simply all kept got to. I can send you $5 a week to make up for what you will lose and chickens, et cetera, by the trip. I think that's sweet. It is sweet. And also, knowing that in so many of Rosa's journals,

she wrote with deep resentment over giving her parents money. It's like, she isn't turnily conflicted about how much she loves and needs them. Like, her mother, particularly. Like, they're so intertwined, they cannot separate from each other. Even in their worst moments, their lives are so connected and they need each other so badly. Anyway, Rose is in San Francisco, she gets divorced,

she gets a job at the San Francisco Bulletin as a secretary, but then her talents are noticed almost immediately and she gets moved up into an editor position and then she gets moved up into a reporter position and starts going out and reporting stories. Wow, that's amazing. Yeah, yeah, wow. So what kind of newspaper was that? Was that say the New York Times or the New York Post? Well, this is still the heyday of yellow journalism, right? And many newspapers at that time encouraged a degree of salaciousness and exaggeration. And scandal.

Scandal cells. And, you know, into this world arrives rows, who it turns out has an enormous talent for taking a kernel of truth and turning it into a fantastic tale that is maybe or maybe not true. Right. There's a very tenuous connection and she was really, really good at it. And again, it's easy and hindsight to be like, oh, that's very shoddy journalism. But having survived both of us on the blogosphere and in tabloid papers in your case, it's like she's a single woman supporting herself

in a city. That's not easy. Not an easy city. No. And she's supporting two aging parents who are financially unstable, you know, in Missouri. It's like, if you're good at this, lean in. And she leaned, right? She leaned and she was very good. You know, she's so good at that she immediately starts pitching these biographies of, you know, Herbert Hoover, who was a politician then

and Charlie Chaplin and Jack London. And pitches them to publishing houses and to their relatives. And in one case to Charlie Chaplin and Jack London, and pitches them to publishing houses and to their relatives, and in one case, to Charlie Chaplin himself, I think, as like highly researched, respectable biographies, and they participated, and then these so-called biographies get published, and they are less biographies than fantastical tales

with one or two facts in them. And a number, I think Jack London's widow sued her, Charlie Chaplin tried to sue her. Her bird hoover was like, wanted to distance himself from her. He wanted nothing to do with her. Henry Ford's widow was furious. But the thing about all that that stands out to me

is that she was not apologetic. It's not like she was like, oh, you caught me. She was like, what are you talking about? I wrote a great book. It makes you look fantastic. She sounds amazing to me. I stand by my earlier statement. I think Rose sounds like a lot of fun. She also sounds like she could have worked at Gokker.

Oh, 100%. She's all of the things she's doing again, feel very relatable and very modern, and she was very good at it. and she is definitely making questionable decisions. But by the early 20s, she's making bank. They paid so highly and she was so good at these. She moved into short story writing, which in the 20s from magazines was very profitable. She started traveling. She traveled to Albania. She hiked the mountains by herself.

She was all over Europe after the war. She was in Paris in the 1920s with that crowd. Yeah, good Paris time, good person. She was in her 40s and she apparently, she apparently attended an orgy as an observer. We don't think she participated, but again, who knows? We don't know. We don't know.

Again, our sense of this two Carolyn Fraser writes, like our sense of her in these time periods are sometimes coming from her sort of colleagues, many of whom are not nice about her. And we both know, writing about women who strong personalities is a very tenuous business. History is not kind to strong women. But colleagues are not kind to strong women.

Like, no, they're not. And again, Rose was a very difficult person. And she had very questionable views on a number of issues. You know, in hindsight, we see her as this incredibly adventurous, talented woman who's traveling around Europe, you know, after the war, she's in Albania, she's hiking in the mountains by herself, and she's in Paris, and it's so enviable. But Rose herself was so ashamed of the poverty that she'd been raised in, and it was something she carried with her, her whole life, which is, I think something to remember,

like these things from childhood that we carry, don't just go away. And she wrote in her journal, like, grows as a big diary keeper, which is how we know a lot of this, right? We know a lot of this from Rose's own diary, so you have to sort of read it, read between the lines from time to time.

She's not the most reliable narrator as we've established, but she wrote in her diary in the late 20s and said, I would change places with any young woman, with intelligent, simple, harmonious parents, good health, and a cultured background. And I mean, we know this, but we all know from social media that you're drawn to the depiction of the thing you feel you don't have.

And it's so clear that Rose desperately wanted to not have come from poverty, to have been better educated, to have had parents who she felt should have been more loving to her. I feel that really hard, though, because I grew up with parents who were both a hot mess, and all I wanted growing up was stability. And so that line that she writes and I guess I would have traded with any girl who had a stable home and who had the things that I didn't have, and I think that it made me a massive striver as an adult. And someone who has a great deal of stability. You.

Exactly. Yeah, who built stability because I did not have it as a child. Rose definitely craves stability throughout her life. And for a long time, she had the funds to achieve it. But at every turn, Rose managed to undermine herself, making an endless series of bad financial decisions just when she got closest to getting the thing she wanted. But nothing would compare to what Rose did when she returned to Mansfield, Missouri in the late 1920s. Rose had spent her entire life trying to get away from Rocky Ridge, and now she was back.

And the first thing she did was use her money to build her parents a new house, a house that neither Laura or Almanza wanted or needed. This house would become the setting of the most explosive, damaging decision Rose ever made. One her mother Laura never got over. In the podcast Alphabet Boys, we take you inside undercover investigations. I'm Trevor Aronson. And in our second season, we have an Alphabet soup with the DEA, the CIA, and the FBI, all mixed up in the same case. At the center of the story is Flavio. But who is Flavio? I see movies with arm dealers on TV.

Okay, I'm going there for see, but I'm gonna die. When I land, there's Flavio in a suit. It's like follow me and he slams down his badge in my passport and I'm like, ah, something's going on here. So you do personal security all over the world and you have somebody call you and say,

can you get grenades and guns for this guy in Colombia? Not, not specified grenades, a lot of ammunition. It's a mystery wrapped around an international arm deal who are the cops, who are the criminals, and is anyone really who they claim to be? Listen to alphabet boys on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

There's a ton of stuff they don't want you to know. Does the US government really have alien technology? And what about the future of artificial intelligence, AI? What happens when computers learn to think? Could there be a serial killer in your town? From UFO's Disci to psychic powers and government cover-ups from unsolved crimes to the bleeding edge of science, history is riddled with unexplained events.

We spent a decade applying critical thinking to some of the most bizarre phenomenon civilization and beyond. Each week, we dive deep into unsolved mysteries, conspiracy theories, and actual conspiracies. You've heard about these things, but what's the full story? Listen to stuff they don't want you to know on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you find your favorite shows.

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and Federal Court. And Academy Award nominee, William H. Macy, as Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackman. My chief qualification being, I'm uncontroversial. You know how we both ended up on the Supreme Court? Politics?

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Wilder rock house. 900 feet. Remember Laura's house, Rocky Ridge in Mansfield, Missouri? The one Laura designed to her own specifications, right down to the height of the kitchen counter? Well up the hill, there's another house. The Rockhouse. I love this house. I'd want to live in their house.

I don't want to live in this house. These windows are rose built as a little retirement home for our parents. The Rockhouse cost $11,000 to build. Close to $200,000 in today's money. And became a metaphor for Rose's relationship with her parents. After a childhood of severe poverty, Rose wanted them to have something beautiful and money and became a metaphor for Rose's relationship with her parents. After childhood of severe poverty, Rose wanted them to have something beautiful and expensive, proof of her success and value in the world.

To me, it looks like such a glamorous house, these floor-to-sealing windows and the arch doors and the basement window. It's so... I know. It could be in a Hollywood film. No expense was spared. And was there electricity in the house? Yes. Rose brought down the electricity at her own expense. From what I recall, I don't think very many houses

in this part of the state had access to electricity. Is that? Now, most of them didn't get electricity until the 40s. But it cost are at $3,000. For those wondering, $3,000 in 1928 is the equivalent of $53,000 in today's money. So Rose built her dream house, insisting it was also her parents dream house and the best thing for them. But neither Laura nor Almanzo particularly wanted to live there. They had built Rocky Ridge to their own specifications.

Still, Rose was a big personality, and Laura and Almanzo could never seem to say no to her. So up the hill they went to live in the rock house and down into Rocky Ridge, a place she'd spent most of her life trying to escape, went Rose. Then the market crashed. This hit the wilder family hard. Rose lost all of her money

and all of Laura's money that she'd invested for them. It was a brutal loss and threw the family back into the financial chaos and insecurity, they'd spent their entire lives trying to climb out of. In 1931, their brokerage, Furn, collapsed. This is Bill Anderson. He's written about Laura extensively. Rose had encouraged her folks to invest, and she was heavily invested. And that's when they really were faced with,

what are we going to do now financially? Rose is a single woman. Even before the rock house, she'd been helping her parents out financially for a long time. Now, in addition to herself and her parents, there were two houses and no money. Add to this, the guilt she felt of

re-losing her parents' money, and it was all too much. Throughout her life, Rose had suffered bouts of depression. We know from Rose's diaries that she often scapegoated Laura for everything that was wrong in her life. In one entry that was typical of this resentment, Rose wrote, it is amazing how my mother can make me suffer, how she hates it that I'm her sole source of support, implicit in every syllable and tone, the fact that I failed, fallen down in the job, been the broken read.

The picture Rose paints of herself in her journals, is that of a woman who runs on martyrdom and bitterness, and is incapable of accepting any love shown to her by Laura. The curious thing is that she's sincerely reaching for some kind of companionship with me. She's trying to be friends. She wants genuine warmth, sympathy. She has not the faintest notion of what she's doing to me,

but underneath there's not a trace of generosity in her. For most of her adult life, Rose had insisted on supplementing her parents' finances and resented it. But in the aftermath of the financial crash, it was Rose who was completely overcome. And it was at this moment that Laura, a person who'd been through many severe ups and downs in her life, sat down and wrote her memoir Pioneer Girl. You were a remember from our last episode about the writing of the Little House books that Laura

initially wrote her memoir Pioneer Girl for adults, but that when Rose took it to our publishing context, it didn't sell. Rose then reworked it as a young children's story, and that did get some attention. And then Laura and Rose took that and reworked it into Little House in the big woods. And boom, Laura's editor called the result a book no depression can stop. While that was happening, Rose was writing too, working on something that she hoped might be a bestseller all her own. Well, sort of her own. Here's where things get absolutely insane. Here's what happens. Laura sells little house in the big woods in 1932

to great excitement. She works with rows on edits for big woods to ready it for publication. At the same time, Rose is helping Laura. She is also secretly writing a novel, titled Let the Hurricane Roar, which she sells to the Saturday evening post. Let the hurricane roar is about a couple, Charles and Caroline.

They are home stethers in South Dakota, who live in a dugout on wild plum creek. Charles plays the violin. They have a baby. Their crops are destroyed by grasshoppers. Charles has to walk hundreds of miles east to find work. Caroline survives a blizzard alone in the house. Does any of this sound familiar? Laura's parents' names are Charles and Caroline. Laura lived in a dugout on Plum Creek.

Hurricane is basically a mesh of stories from Laura's own childhood, which Rose knew Laura intended to utilize in future books, mixed with facts from Laura's early marriage to Almanzo. No really. At the same time Laura was celebrating the publication of Big Woods, Rose wrote a novel based on her mother's life, and sold that under her own name to the Saturday evening post, which serialized it. The crazier thing is that Rose may have done it without her mother's permission or even

Laura's knowledge. We cannot know with 100% accuracy if Rose Wilder Lane wrote, let the hurricane war in secret, but it looks very, very likely that she did. And I actually think it was a little bit more insidious than that. Up until 1932, Rose had never shown any interest in writing about the pioneer life. She'd been asked to by various editors, but had never been excited by the idea. Until she and her mother tried to sell pioneer girl to the Saturday various editors, but had never been excited by the idea. Until she and her mother tried to sell Pioneer Girl to the Saturday evening post. As you remember, Rose told her mother that Pioneer Girl was rejected. But that might not have been the whole truth.

Apparently after turning it down, the Saturday evening post may have reconsidered. Lane's literary agent got back in touch with her and said, Hey, I've heard from the Saturday evening post. And they are interested in a nonfiction serial about the pioneer days, and they wanted me to get in touch with you, but now they're interested in pioneer girl. Apparently, Lane never told her mother that. And so, you know, Saturday DeVine Poest ultimately, of course,

bought Let The Hurricane Roar. It was published in the fall of 1932. And then shortly after the book was published, Lane left Rocky Ridge Farm on an extended trip back east. I want to get this straight. So let me recap for a second. After Little House in the Big Woods, Rose started writing her own novel, which was a fictionalized version of her parents, Laura and Almanzo's marriage.

But she changed the names to Laura's parents, Charles and Caroline. And she did this all without telling her mom she was doing it. Yes, I'm nodding my head emphatically like we're on a talk show right now and you're Oprah and we're like what? The whole audience is like what? Like doesn't it feel like we're on some crazy talk show? It feels more Jerry Springer to me. It feels totally feels Jerry.

This is a Jerry Springer episode. Imagine doing that to your mother. So like Rose is simultaneously, spends her life trying to get away from Mansfield and her mother and yet spends her life also writing about her mother. We're like stealing her mother's stories. It is a Jerry Springer show. And her mother didn't even know. Yeah, like crazy. Eventually, Laura did find out and she didn't take the news well. According to Laura's biographer, Caroline Fraser, Laura found out about the deception during a get-together in her own home, with Rose present, when Rose's friend, not knowing it was a secret, brought out copies of the advanced advertisements for Hurricane.

The advertisements were illustrations of Charles and Caroline. Laura's beloved parents, as dashing Hollywood-esque figures gazing into the future as if they've been cast in some larger-than-life big-screen epic romance. Laura was stunned and confused. According to Rose's own journals, Laura wanted to know why her parents were in Dakota as a young couple. Here's Emily and I, re-enacting the conversation as Rose recorded it in her journal. Why do they place it in the Dakotas? I don't know.

The names aren't right. What names? Charles and Caroline, they don't belong in that place at all. Rose internally in her head. My mother has effectively destroyed the simple perfection of my pleasure. Perhaps the most extraordinary part of Rose's version is Rose, pretending that she had no idea why the story she had written was written in the way she'd written it. Rose liked to claim she hadn't told Laura about Hurricane because her mother never cared about her writing.

But even if there was a shred of truth to that statement, why had Rose chosen to use the name Charles in Caroline? To use the details of Laura's childhood that Rose knew were sacred to her mother, and also knew that her mother planned to use in future books. While to felt betrayed, and why wouldn't you feel betrayed? Here's Pamela Smith-Hill again. I don't think she ever knew that the Saturday evening post had again been interested in Pioneer Girl. I don't think she ever knew that.

But she did feel betrayed because the main characters and let the hurricane war named Charles and Caroline. He plays the fiddle, she's quiet and restrained. There were all kinds of episodes lifted directly from Pioneer Girl. The whole book really comes directly from Pioneer Girl. So she felt betrayed. It's difficult to know Laura's exact feelings on this because she did not keep a journal.

But there's a lot of evidence that the hurricane incident caused a huge rift between Laura and Rose. According to Caroline Fraser, the implosion between the mother and daughter was so spectacular, people in Mansfield still speak about it today. There's still memories about this hanging around in Mansfield, sorry. That's how big a deal it was. It all sounds cataclysmic.

How could this have happened? How could these two ever work together again? As with everything to do with Laura and Rose, there are multiple theories. And as always, because Laura herself never kept a record of her own feelings, all these theories are guesswork.

For instance, did Rose go behind her mother's back and steal her story for adult audiences and her own glory? Or were the two women in on this together? And maybe Laura was just surprised by the details of that story. Was Hurricane just more proof of the confused, messy overlap of these two women's personal and professional lives? Or was this just the biggest example yet, a rose's self-destructive behavior?

And most importantly, how did all this impact the Little House series, most of which had yet to be written. In the podcast, Alphabet Boys, we take you inside undercover investigations. I'm Trevor Aronson. And in our second season, we have an Alphabet soup with the DEA, the CIA, and the FBI all mixed up in the same case. At the center of this story is Flavio. But who is Flavio? I see movies with arm dealers on TV. Okay, I'm going there forcié, but I'm gonna die.

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And because we have no version of Laura's side, there's some debate whether Rose was deceiving Laura when she wrote Let the Hurricane Roar, or whether Laura knew what Rose was up to and was just upset by some of the details. There are some scholars who don't think Hurricane was a huge deception on Rose's part. The family did meet the money

and writing was basically the family business by this point. From what I've been able to determine, wilder knew that Rose was going to fictionalize part of her autobiography. I don't think that was a surprise to Laura. Bill Anderson agrees with this theory. I don't really think it was sneaky.

This was a family that was severely hurt by the Depression. Zlora, and El Man Manzo and Rose were in this together, in that they were sharing the stories. Rose was modifying them, making them publishable. And as the team, they were able to keep themselves out of poverty. Still, most scholars are in agreement that Laura was appalled by the way Rose fictionalized her family stories. I think the surprise was that she didn't take the pioneer girl so

much as she took her mother's and her father's story and confused it with Carolyn and Charles. Wilders first reaction to this story is, what are they doing there? That's not right. Those people weren't there in that time period. Whatever Rose and Laura's agreement, if there even was one, Rose writing Hurricane the way she did, did damage to an already fraught relationship. It was the most public display so far of a long-simmering resentment Rose had felt

towards her mother since childhood. You know, it was kind of an expression of Rose's, you know, passive aggression of her trying to get back at her mother for things that had happened. There were the all these kind of old resentments and old assumptions. Rose was always saying, you know, she won't let me grow up. She doesn't see me as an adult. In the hurricane incident, it's obvious that that childhood resentment was now being mixed with some intense professional envy. I think she was the kind of writer who projected this image

of self-confidence and yet she was well aware of her own limitations. And I do think, based on what I've seen in the editorial correspondence between the two, that on the one hand lane discounted her mother's work. On the other hand, she knew that her mother was becoming a best-selling writer, and I think Lane did feel a sense of rivalry with her mother. So all of that was enormously complicated. We can only guess at Laura's feelings over this. However enraged or hurt she might have been, we have no record of it from her.

But we do know for a fact what she did. Laura did what she always did in the face of calamity. She got to work. Nancy Teistag Kupel believes Laura's way of coping with Rose's deception was to get down on paper, even just for herself, what had actually happened in those difficult early years of her marriage to Almanzo. Her objection, I believe, was to the confusion that Lane added to the story, and that's why I think she wrote the first four years because she wanted to get her own story

Down the way it happened, at least in her mind and not the way Lane would fictionalize it This small act of testimony would end up complicating both Laura and Rose's legacy in ways neither of them could have foreseen Laura's account of the worst years of her life would eventually be published as the first four years and launch a decades-long conspiracy theory over authorship of the entire Little House series. But in the meantime, the writing of the Little House series needed to go on, and it was this necessity

that may have saved Rose and Laura's relationship. It is surprising that they were able to kind of continue on together with the books. That's Caroline Fraser, and in Prairie Fires, she writes, there may have been another reason Laura was able to forgive Rose. After Laura discovered the hurricane deception, Rose plunged into such a prolonged state of depression that Laura was worried about her mental state and even feared for Rose's life. Laura's anger may have been cut short by real concern over her daughter's survival. I think Laura did have a really hot temper. I think she knew it. She admitted

it. You know, Almanzo knew about it. He talked about it. But I think she could also, you know, analyze herself later and say, Oh, you know, I need to apologize for this. I think she did apologize for some of the ways, you know, in which she hurt Rose. And Laura could also just be very sweet, you know, I mean, she, she had a sweetness to her character and a generosity of spirit, which is really admirable. Whatever the reason Laura and Rose's collaboration on Farmer Boy is what saved their relationship. By this point, in 1933, Rose had left home, possibly to escape her shame and Laura's wrath, and was on an extended research trip in upstate New York.

Although their relationship was still strained, we can see from letters that their collaboration was beginning to reignite. Here's Pamela Smith-Hill again. While she was away in New York, she sent postcards back to her mom and visited Malone, New York. And while there was already beginning, she had already written a draft of Farmer Boy, but Lanes sent that postcard, she sent descriptions of Malone, New York. And so by the time that they're reunited at Rocky Rich Farm and the holidays are over, they began to work on another version of Farmer Boy.

Farmer Boy, Laura's follow-up to Big Woods, was based on Almanzo's life. The first draft she and Rose turned in, completed in the terrible aftermath of the Hurricane Deception, was turned down. Laura and Rose received this news just as hurricane was publishing, which must have added salt to the already terrible wound. One of the issues with Farmer Boy is that Laura was writing about something she hadn't directly experienced, and it showed. She and Rose had to come back together and do it again.

Here's Pamela Smith-Hill again. I think Farmer Poe apparently was the project that healed the rift between the two of them, because they worked on that together. And then by the time that Farmer Poe was accepted, Something had triggered Wilder to think bigger about her work, and really they collaborated throughout the 1930s, not just on the Little House series, but even on Free Land. Free Land is Lane's second novel, and it again pulls from Lauren Almonzo's experience as well as Laura's parents, Charles, and Caroline's.

Rose may have learned her lesson this time though, since the main characters are named David and Neddy, a young couple who take up the offer free land in Dakota Territory. In 1937, when Lane was working on free land, which comes directly from material out of Pioneer Girl, Wilda was working on by the, which comes directly from material out of Pioneer Girl. Wilder was working on by the shores of Silver Lake.

They were writing sometimes the same scene, similar characters. And at this point, they were talking about it back and forth openly. We have editorial correspondence. In 1937, the Saturday evening post paid Rose $30,000 to serialize Freeland. That's more than $600,000 in today's money. That's more than the biggest Freelance magazine writer makes today. Freeland also seemed to mark the end of the push and pull struggle over who had a right to what parts of whose story. So by the late 1930s,

they had pretty much sorted out how they were going to go forward. Rose was now permanently living away from Mansfield and Laura was gaining confidence in her own writing. Their collaboration continued, but it was mostly by letter correspondence now, which perhaps eased some of the intensity of their relationship. After Rose's departure, Lauren Almanza returned to their own dream house, Rocky Ridge Farm,

where Laura wrote each day in her specially built writing nook, with a view of the garden. Each successive little housebook was a great success and brought increasing financial stability to both mother and daughter. And yet, the most surprising part of this intense collaboration was still to come. No one involved could have foretold its long and complicated legacy, which eventually reached all the way to Hollywood and nearly made it to the White House. We're still feeling the effects of Rose and Laura's

extraordinary relationship today, in ways you may be shocked to discover. That's next week in part two of Rose Wilder Lane. of Rose Wilder Lane. Wilder is written and hosted by me, Gluinness McNichol. Our story editors are Joe Piazza and Emily Marinoff. Our senior producer is Emily Marinoff. Our producers are Mary Dew, Shino Ozaki, and Jessica Crine-Chitch. Our associate producer is Lauren Philip, sound designed in mixing by Amanda

Rose Smith. Our theme and additional music was composed by Elise McCoy. We are executive produced by Joe Piazza, Nikki Tore, Ali Perry, and me. If you're enjoying Wilder, please consider rating and reviewing us on Apple podcasts. It actually helps us out quite a lot. Thank you to the Laura Ingalls Wilder Memorial Society in Dismitt, South Dakota, and the Laura Ingalls Wilder Historic Home and Museum in Mansfield, Missouri. And a special shout out to Caroline Fraser, whose book Prairie Fires is the Motherload

on Rose and Laura's relationship. Thank you as always to CDM Studios. Please see our show notes if you want to know more about the people we interviewed, the places we visited, the books we mentioned, you can also find our contact info there if you want to write to us with your own thoughts and questions. Follow us on Instagram at Wilder underscore podcast and on TikTok at Wilder podcast where you can see behind-the-scenes footage from all our travels. Thank you for listening. We'll see you next week.

Like sand through the hourglass. So go the houses. Alphabet Boys is a podcast that takes you inside undercover investigations. In the second season, we've got an alphabet soup with the DEA, the CIA, and the FBI all mixed up in the same case. So you do personal security all over the world and you had somebody call you and say, can you get renamed and done for this guy in Colombia? No, no, no. It's a mystery wrapped around an international arm steel,

alphabet boys, on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So there is a ton of stuff they don't want you to know. Yeah, like does the US government really have alien technology? Or what about the future of AI? What happens when computers actually learn to think? Could there be a serial killer in your town? From UFOs to psychic powers and government cover-ups, from unsolved crimes to the bleeding edge of science,

history is riddled with unexplained events. Listen to stuff they don't want you to know on the iHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you find your favorite shows. From iHeart Podcasts Supreme, the Battle for Row, tells the story of the unlikely champions behind the landmark case Roe V Wade, starring Maya Hawke as 26-year-old lead attorney Sarah Weddington for challenging the Texas abortion laws in federal court.

And Academy Award nominee William H. Macy as Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackman. Time is not the most important factor, getting it right is. Listen to the podcast's Supreme, The Battle for Ro, on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.