In Little House in the Big Woods, the reader never finds out exactly how many yellow jacket stings cover Charley; Wilder merely writes that “hundreds and hundreds of bees were stinging him.” By the way, yellow jackets (Vespula spp.) aren’t bees.

In By the Shores of Silver Lake (Chapter 7, “The West Begins”), Cousin Charley is reintroduced as “the big boy who had bothered Uncle Henry and Pa in the oat field, and been stung by thousands of yellow jackets.”

So. Which is closest to the truth? Had Charley been stung by hundreds or thousands of yellow jackets? While even one sting can be fatal to a person who is severely allergic, the average adult can safely tolerate 10 stings per pound of body weight. 500 stings can supposedly kill a child. a
Charley Quinerwas born in 1862, so if the “cry wolf” story really happened while the Ingallses and Quiners were living in the Big Woods, he was at most twelve years old when the story took place (since the Charles Ingalls family left Wisconsin in 1874). If you go by what Wilder wrote, the story happened when Laura was about five years old, so Charley would have been about ten years old.

I can’t even begin to imagine how much that must have hurt!