"Follows the Ingalls family's journey through Kansas, Missouri, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, back to Minnesota, and on to Dakota Territory, [examining] sixteen years of travels, unforgettable experiences, and the everyday people who became immortal through Wilder's fiction. Using additional manuscripts, letters, photographs, newspapers, and other sources, ... Wilder biographer Pamela Smith Hill adds ... context and leads readers through Wilder's growth...

Contains a collection of letters written by the author to a former employer in Denver over the course of several years, in which she describes her frontier life homesteading in Burnt Fork, Wyoming.

The true-life story of women's experiences in the Wild West is more gripping, heart-rending, and stirring than all the movies, novels, folk legends, and ballads of popular imagination. Hard-drinking, hard-living poker players and prostitutes of the new boomtowns; wives and mothers traveling two and a half thousand miles across the prairies in covered-wagon convoys, some of them so poor they walked the entire route; African American women in search...

A chronicle of the mid-nineteenth-century wagon train tragedy draws on the perspectives of one of its survivors, Sarah Graves, recounting how her new husband and she joined the Donner party on their California-bound journey and encountered violent perils, in an account that also offers insight into the scientific reasons that some died while others survived.