the twenty dollar bill
In The Long Winter (Chapter 11, "Pa Goes to Volga"), Pa brings Mr. Edwards back to De Smet with him and Mr. Edwards deposits a twenty dollar bill in Mary's lap and makes his escape before the family knows it's there.

According to an online currency converter (westegg.com/inflation/), that twenty dollars would be worth $396.03 in 2005. During the hard winter, you could supposedly buy for about a dollar what you can get for twenty today. I don't know if the currency converter is accurate, and it's hard to worry too much about that twenty dollars anyway since it's highly unlikely that Mr. Edwards was a single character (even in Little House on the Prairie) who actually was in De Smet in 1879, and it turns out that Laura Ingalls Wilder told the story a bit differently in her Hard Winter manuscript.

In the manuscript, there is a whole chapter edited out in which Pa and Mr. Edwards have met up in Volga and are spending the night in the hotel. Mr. Edwards decides to join a poker game, asking the men if poker is played "anything like 7-up." Of course this implies that Mr. Edwards doesn't know a thing about poker, and he is invited to join the game. Pa figures Mr. Edwards has little money to lose, so he doesn't say a thing.

Turns out that Mr. Edwards is a card shark with more tricks up his sleeve than cards in the deck. He ends up winning over $500 in the game, and the next morning, he decides to accompany Pa back to De Smet on the handcar to avoid the other poker players finding him.

In De Smet, Mr. Edwards tells Ma and the girls about his gambling winnings, but it's stressed that Pa didn't drink (Mr. Edwards did) and he didn't gamble. So Ma and the others know full well where the twenty dollars came from. It was no great sacrifice for Mr. Edwards to part with the money because he still had the 2005 equivalent of almost ten thousand dollars in his pocket.
- posted by pioneergirl at 12:56 PM