Wilder, however, wasn’t entirely happy with her part-time career, or with her obscurity. Her sensible opinions on housekeeping, marriage, husbandry, country life, and, more rarely, on politics and patriotism were expressed in a plain style, with an occasional ecstatic flourish inspired by her love for “the sweet, simple things of life which are the real ones after all.” A work ethic inherited from her Puritan forebears, which exalted labor and self-improvement not merely for their material rewards but as moral values, was, she believed, the key to happiness. Readers of The Missouri Ruralist knew her as Mrs. She also enjoyed meetings of her embroidery circle, and of the Justamere Club, a study group that she helped found. The family lived at Rocky Ridge, a farm in the Ozarks, near Mansfield, Missouri, where Wilder raised chickens and tended an apple orchard. Laura Elizabeth Ingalls Wilder was a matron of sixty-five, neat and tiny-about four feet eleven-who was known as Bessie to her husband, Almanzo, and as Mama Bess to her daughter, Rose. In April of 1932, an unlikely literary débutante published her first book. Their daughter, born a year later, was named for the wild roses on the prairie. And it reveals, not just her own journey, but a whole country on the move-trails clogged with covered wagons-hundreds of people leaving heartbreak and disappointment behind, daring to hope for a better life on the road ahead.Laura Ingalls married Almanzo Wilder in 1885. Her diary reflects how her spirits lifted as they moved away from the harshness of the dusty prairie into a lavish landscape of trees and fruit. Throughout the 650-mile journey that took six weeks, Laura chronicled the weather, the people, and the places they saw.

The Wilders’ move came after years of hardship in De Smet, South Dakota-drought and crop failure, a case of diphtheria that left Almanzo physically debilitated, the devastating loss of their infant son, and an accident that caused their house to burn down. We catch a glimpse of the real Laura Ingalls Wilder as a young wife and mother, in a diary that she kept during the summer of 1894 when she, her husband, Almanzo, and their seven-year-old daughter, Rose, moved from South Dakota to Missouri. When most people think of Laura Ingalls Wilder, they conjure up a young, fictionalized version of the author-a persona created in Little House on the Prairie, and other beloved children’s books that portrayed the hardscrabble life of an American pioneer family in the late-nineteenth century. America on the Move Laura Ingalls Wilder - A Journey from South Dakota to Missouri, 1894

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