Caroline Ingalls

on, Jen.

Meanwhile back home, well Caroline's gonna be, she's gonna be the one who rallies all the wives to get out and harvest the wheat.

Yeah, you know she's gonna be, she's gonna be the one who salvages all the crops.

Kind of like Harvest of Friends.

And they came to hard times a lot and they had to move a lot because they would run out of money or come into hard times because a crop failed or they made a poor financial choice.

So that was really interesting.

And Caroline, in that way, She didn't make the financial decisions of we're going to harvest this much.

We're going to buy this much.

Um, and that's, uh, you know, I think this is a thing that, that is hard for us to understand because it's, we're so used to it, but if you look back at culture, you know, the last 50 years, like, it's very hard on one hand to hold up a, a, a, a mother that you esteem in, in the public, um, in any way.

Um, like Ma Ingalls is kind of about it, and that's, you know, m- most people age out [laughs] with because of she.

This is a long time ago.

Well, looking at her children, I mean, they, they're, I mean, in Wisconsin, like we, that's, like, in my territory.

Yeah.

Mom always says, don't play ball in the house.

Yeah.

That's it.

well like

Maybe it's important to other people.

Mom would wear a

corset.

Her family was living in Wisconsin when she was born.

Wisconsin was still considered kind of frontier, but at some point, for reasons we're not entirely sure, Charles and Caroline Ingalls, her parents, moved to Missouri, which is something that Wilder did not write about.

She was only two years old.

They stayed in Missouri for maybe just a few weeks.

It was not the picture she wanted to create of her fictional family.

For listeners who aren't as familiar with the Little House books, can you give us a bit of a sense of the family unit and what sort of themes was she dealing with? What can you pull out for us here?

When the Little House books open in Little House in the Big Woods, the family unit includes Pa and Ma, Charles and Caroline Ingalls; Mary, Laura's older sister, who is two years older than Laura; Laura, who is the main character; and baby Carrie.

That is the family unit throughout the books until we get to By the Shores of Silver Lake, when baby Grace is born, a family of four girls like Little Women, in a way.