In 1937, Laura Ingalls Wilder explained her motivation for writing her already well-loved Little House books: “What a wonderful childhood I had had. . . . I realized that I had seen and lived it all — all the successive phases of the frontier, first the frontiersman, then the pioneer, then the farmers and the towns. Then I understood that in my own life I represented a whole period of American history.”
In this new book, author Caroline Fraser has turned Wilder’s evocation of progressive phases of western American history upside down. What the dust jacket calls the “first comprehensive historical …
