The new, old Little House -- ii

Balancing the sometimes contrary demands of the true story itself is not an easy task for a writer. Laura Ingalls Wilder was fashioning a classic for kids when she began (she was 65 years old!) to write books using her own experience and her family's pioneer saga on the way west. 

What the TV series didn't really examine was the plain fact that Charles Wilder was a squatter, someone who knew the truth but homesteaded on land he, as a white man, should have acknowledged to be Osage land. In today's language, we might say the Wilder family were "undocumented"; they'd moved on to land they weren't entitled to--they were illegals because all around them at the time were patches of land that had been the province of a variety of Native nations. They should not have been there; ICE would have moved them out.

In 1870, the Drum Creek Treaty was signed, promising the Osage nation "$1.50 an acre" for all Osage land and mandating that all would-be homesteaders (like the Wilders) had to leave before the same land would be opened up for homesteading (although the land would be for sale, not free). The new Netflix series ends with the Wilder family back in their covered wagon, bound for Minnesota, which is the historically accurate move. They're on their way to Walnut Grove, where, this Saturday, a local group will stage, outdoors, their final 2026 production of the Ingalls family story, the Wilder Pageant. 

If you're interested, you might want to look at a website that tells the story of the story and determine yourself how much of the Netflix production is accurate to history and how much is pure storytelling. 

Either way, this new version of the story is worth watching (take if from a story-teller).