Laura and Almanzo’s son was born July 11, 1889, in the house on his father’s tree claim. In the late 1950s, Rose told De Smet News editor, Aubrey Sherwood, that she had no information about the birth and death of her brother. This also suggests that Rose never read the “First Three Years” manuscript while Laura was alive, and that she didn’t read all of it when shown it by Irene Lichty. After inquiring about upkeep of the family graves in the De Smet Cemetery – something Laura made a stipulation for in her will – Rose Wilder Lane supposedly first learned of her brother’s existence at all, something she must not have remembered and her parents never talked about. The First Four Years contains stories of sadness and tragedy in the young family, and one of the saddest is the story of the death of Laura and Almanzo’s unnamed son, Rose’s brother. It was some time after Rose’s death that Roger MacBride published it.” After Laura’s death and the manuscript’s discovery at Rocky Ridge Farm, Rose Wilder Lane told Irene Lichty (first curator of the museum along with her husband Lewis, and written by Lichty in a 1986 letter to William Holtz) that “she would never publish the manuscript because it wasn’t up to her mother’s writings. This was the manuscript mentioned by Laura in letters to Rose as an adult novel she had started long before the Little House series was even finished.

Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “The First Three Years and a Year of Grace” manuscript told the story of Laura and Almanzo’s early married years after These Happy Golden Years ended, but it wasn’t published until 1971 as The First Four Years. But their son was born before the doctor could get there. In the afternoon Manly sent Peter to bring Laura’s Ma, and at four o’clock he sent Peter again to town, this time on his running pony for the doctor.

Laura and almanzo wilder