To be released on Laura’s birthday, A Little House Traveler: Writings From Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Journey Across America. HarperCollins, list price $16.99, ages 9-12. This book will contain material currently published as On the Way Home and West From Home, plus a previously unpublished journal account of the 1931 trip Laura and Rose made from Mansfield, Missouri, to De Smet and the Black Hills of South Dakota. Will this also be an edited account, like On the Way Home?
While it makes me mad as a wet hen to think about the publishing of this book, I’ll be buying it for the new material. Just remember that if you have any great ideas for a LIW publication, be careful who you share them with, because ideas can’t be copyrighted. Meaning they can be stolen.
Laura and Almanzo – along with Neta and Silas Seal – made a car trip together a few years after the 1931 one we’ll read about in the Traveler. Neta Seal kept a journal during this trip; it was given to Helen Burkhiser and portions published in the booklet about “Laura’s Friend.” One can only guess that Laura also kept a journal during the later trip, so here’s hoping that Traveler Redux also makes it into print.
One of my LIW special treasures is a china “Montana” tea-cup that Neta Seal purchased during this trip with the Wilders. The couples spent the night in my old town, Missoula, in cabins along the Clark Fork River that weren’t torn down until about ten years ago. They were owned by a previous resident of Wright County, Missouri, and the cabins were advertised as coming with “all the melted snow water you could drink… free!”
