The True Story of Laura Ingalls Is Much Wilder than Anything in ‘Little House on the Prairie’

But rather than depicting him as a freeloader, a draft-dodger, or a squanderer, Laura (both young and old) loved and idolized her father. In her books, he’s lionized, shown as “charming, cheerful, and musical,” writes Fraser. Even as he punishes his kids’ minor childhood misbehavior with the strap, notes Fraser, “he did it with a glint in his eye that told her it would be all right.” Years later, the television show’s Michael Landon—who served as its lead actor as well as its producer, director and head writer—portrayed Pa (and himself) as a wholesome and gallant man, solidifying the character as someone far more moral, upstanding and stable than the real Charles Ingalls.

Michael Landon as Pa Ingalls in the original TV series.

When a new Republican government cracked down on handouts in 1876, an infuriated Pa quit farming for town life. But because it wouldn’t fit neatly into the pioneer narrative of a carefree Laura skipping through open fields, the Ingalls’s next chapter never appeared in her books. It was an ill-fated effort at running a bawdy hotel and tavern in what Wilder later called the “dark and dirty” town of Burr Oak in Iowa.

Tragedy struck during their 200-mile journey there, when Wilder’s little-known younger brother, 9-month-old Freddy, fell ill. Even in Pioneer Girl, her posthumous autobiography published in 2014, Wilder couldn’t bring herself to write more than a curt paragraph about the loss. “Little Brother was not well and the Dr. came,” she wrote. “I thought that would cure him…but [he] got worse instead of better and one awful day he straightened out his little body and was dead.” The only Ingalls brother was buried nearby, and the Ingalls family travelled on.

At age nine, Laura Ingalls Wilder began the first of her many service jobs—as “a dishwasher, cook, maid, babysitter, waitress, seamstress, companion and general dogsbody,” writes Fraser. This gig was at the Burr Oak House, a rough hotel with bullet holes in the walls and not infrequent fires that catered to settlers passing through.

Child labor may have been the least of Laura's problems in Burr Oak. Drunken brawls, shady dealings and unsavoury characters were daily occurrences there. Particularly disturbing was one family who, in lieu of the money owed to them, offered to take Laura instead. Rather than sell their child, the Ingalls loaded their wagon in the middle of the night, skipped town, and moved back to Minnesota..

Once there, Laura was still expected to work for 50 cents a week (about $15 today) at the Masters family hotel, where Pa worked as a carpenter, a place rife with drunkenness, violence and extramarital affairs, One night, writes Fraser, 11-year-old Laura awoke to find her boss’s married, 20-something-year-old son “looming over her, smelling of whiskey and apparently intent on molesting her.” After that, Laura wasn’t allowed to sleep over at the hotel anymore. But the Ingalls still remained employed at the hotel until necessity—that is, another batch of insurmountable debts—led the family to load their wagon and relocate once more.