Life for settlers in the American West was tough, yet there was friendship and a sense of community too, at least according to Little House on the Prairie. How much of what we see on the screen can we believe? Jonathan Wright sorts truth from dramatic invention
In 1974, a wholesome new family show made its bow on NBC. It starred a bouffant-haired Michael Landon as Charles Ingalls. Frankly, Landon looked as if he could barely survive five minutes without access to a hairdryer, let alone in the wilderness. Nonetheless, the first TV version of Little House on the Prairie, with its emphasis on moral lessons and family bonds, was a huge hit and ran for nine seasons.
The show took its name from the third book in a series of semi-autobiographical children’s novels written by Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867–1957). Fast forward to 2026 and a new version overseen by showrunner Rebecca Sonnenshine is a huge hit on Netflix. Once again, the Ingalls family – Charles, his wife Caroline and their daughters, Laura and Mary – lie at the centre of the drama as we follow their efforts to build a new life from scratch.
They’re good company, but the source material for their creation has long caused controversy, not least because the real-life Ingalls family built a homestead on land that belonged to the Osage Nation. Even updated for the 21st century, is this an idealised vision of the past? How much of what we see is historically accurate?
Who was Laura Ingalls Wilder?
Descended from Richard Warren (c1585–1628), one of the ‘Pilgrims’ who sailed to the New World aboard the Mayflower in 1620, Wilder could also trace her lineage to the Delano family that numbered Franklin Delano Roosevelt among its most illustrious sons. She was a distant cousin of another US president, Ulysses S Grant.
When she was two years old, her family moved from Wisconsin to Kansas, where they settled on reservation land occupied by the Osage Nation. According to Wilder, her parents had been incorrectly told the area was open for settlement. As a result, they lived in fear of eviction and lasted just a couple of years before heading back to Wisconsin.
Wilder’s writing career began in 1911 after she submitted an article to the Missouri Ruralist, a publication for the farming community. She subsequently became a columnist, the author of ‘As a Farm Woman Thinks’. Her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane (1886–1968), also became a journalist. Both women suffered heavy financial losses in the Wall Street Crash, but the family finances were saved when Wilder showed Lane an autobiographical manuscript, the basis for the first of eight Little House books published in her lifetime, Little House in the Big Woods (1932).
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Did mother and daughter ever work together on articles or books?
The question of how much Lane edited her mother’s prose, and even wrote sections herself, has long been controversial. It has even been suggested Lane acted as Wilder’s ghostwriter. What we can say for certain is that, while their relationship was sometimes fractious, there was an ongoing collaborative process. Analysis of correspondence and notebooks suggests the influence of Lane of Wilder’s prose varies from book to book. Wilder influenced Lane too, with the younger woman drawing on family lore in her novel Let the Hurricane Roar (1933, later republished as The Young Pioneers).
Both women were also important figures in libertarianism, a movement that within the American context has become associated with laissez-faire capitalism. One-time Democrat Wilder’s association began with her unhappiness over what she saw as a growing dependence on the government during the New Deal era – policies, of course, instituted by her distant relative.
For her part, Lane was a central figure in launching the American libertarian movement during the 1940s and 1950s. Her contributions were both financial and as an advocate. The influence of her non-fiction book The Discovery of Freedom: Man’s Struggle Against Authority (1943) was so great that she’s known as one of the three mothers of libertarianism, along with fellow writers Isabel Paterson (1886–1961) and Ayn Rand (1905–82), both of whom she numbered as friends.
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How accurate are the depictions of Charles and Caroline, ‘Pa’ and ‘Ma’, in the new series?
While he’s less idealised than in the 1970s adaptation, Charles (Luke Bracey) in the Netflix series is shown as musical, emotionally intelligent, decent, worried over money issues and prone to wanderlust. There’s truth in this depiction, although it underplays just how disruptive Charles’s need to move on was to his family life. More to his credit, Charles was a man who could turn his hand to everything from carpentry to storekeeping to working as a justice of the peace, making him an adaptable frontiersman.
Caroline (Crosby Fitzgerald) is shown as a gentle and patient woman, albeit one who occasionally puts her foot down. The real-life Caroline appears to have been more of a disciplinarian. Her life was often difficult. Her father, a sailor, died when she was just five when the schooner on which he was serving as second mate, Ocean, capsized in Lake Michigan. Through much of her life, while she raised four daughters, she mourned the loss of her baby son, Freddie Ingalls (1875–76).
Was Dr George A Tann a real person?
Yes. In the opening episode of the new adaptation, we are introduced to an African-American doctor, George Tann (Jocko Sims), who in real life was born to a free black family in Pennsylvania in 1835 (although some sources suggest 1825). He practised eclectic medicine, an approach that combined conventional techniques with an emphasis on botanical treatments, the use of medicinal plants, including those used by Native Americans. In 1870, he treated the Ingalls family for malaria.
Did settlers really try to occupy Osage Nation land?
Yes, including lands in Kansas the Osage were forced to sell. Today, many who can trace Osage lineage live in Oklahoma. It’s a story related to the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which legislated “for an exchange of lands with the Indians residing in any of the states or territories, and for their removal west of the river Mississippi”.
In the early 20th century, oil was discovered beneath their land. While the sale of mineral rights was lucrative, this also had unhappy consequences. A so-called Reign of Terror ensued in the 1920s as greedy opportunists targeted the Osage people’s new-found wealth. The story was documented in David Grann’s book Killers of the Flower Moon (2017), the basis for the 2023 Martin Scorsese film starring Leonardo DiCaprio.
Was John Edwards a real person?
In the Little House reboot, we are introduced to an alcoholic settler, John Edwards, played by Warren Christie as an anguished man dealing with post-American Civil War PTSD and bereavement – and prone to delirium tremors. Little House researchers have suggested contenders as the inspiration for a character described in the books as “the wildcat from Tennessee”. Equally, Edwards may have been a composite.
Little House on the Prairie is streaming on Netflix