For all their conflicts, mother and daughter were of one mind about the imperative of making as much money as possible — Wilder to use it with care, Lane to spend it improvidently. Writing under her own name, Lane was a vigorous entrepreneur, authoring controversial, largely fraudulent biographies of noted figures (Charlie Chaplin, Henry Ford, Herbert Hoover) and embracing a style of journalism untroubled by concern for truth or accuracy. In midlife, she became a master practitioner of a genre undergoing a renaissance in our own time: the bitter political screed. Rose achieved fame with fevered attacks on the intrusion of federal power into the lives of citizens. “I could kill Roosevelt,” she wrote of the president to a friend in 1935, “with pleasure and satisfaction. If living got too much for me so that I really wanted to die, I would go to Washington first and kill that traitor.”

Although there is no evidence that Wilder knew of her daughter’s dreams of life (followed by instant death!) as an assassin, Fraser tells us that she was “neither perturbed nor alarmed” by her daughter’s political expressions and “in fact supported her beliefs wholeheartedly.”

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Both Wilder and Lane lived their lives deeply preoccupied by the effort to make sense of their heritage: the story of a pioneer family who worked very hard, sacrificed a great deal, and still remained trapped in failure. Like many homesteaders on the plains in the late 19th century, Charles Ingalls tried repeatedly to acquire land and create a profitable farm that would provide a home for his family. Each effort led straight to the loss of the land. His daughter and granddaughter confronted a question that occupies center stage in our times: When people embrace, trust, and act on the proposition that the United States is a land of opportunity, how are they to make sense of failure?

What destroyed Charles Ingalls’s dream? Did the market steal rewards from farmers with falling crop prices? Was it simply that rainfall would rarely suffice for their farming methods, with seasons of adequate rain giving rise to hopes that droughts then knocked for a loop? Did the federal government make false promises? Were American cultural ideals — particularly the sanctification of self-sufficient yeoman farmers — at fault? Or did individuals simply make ill-considered choices and cause their own troubles?

“There was blame to go around,” Fraser writes of the troubled relationship between Wilder and Lane. The same assessment surely applies to the conundrum of pioneer failure. In some of the book’s most thought-provoking reflections, Fraser lays out the choice the two women faced. Could the descendants of fiddle-playing, spirit-lifting, steady and kind Charles Ingalls write a forthright appraisal of his poor judgment in betting his family’s fortunes on risky prospects? Letting Pa off the hook and blaming the government was unmistakably the preferable option.

Placing the Ingalls family’s homesteading mishaps in a bigger picture of national enterprise is one of many demonstrations of Fraser’s admirable commitment to presenting her research in a broader historical context. But sometimes this causes the literary gears to grind. The book has a 16-page prelude, for example, which recounts the defeat and displacement of the tribal people who lived in the area of Minnesota where the Ingalls family arrived in 1863. The prelude arises from a principled choice, making it very clear that Native Americans had long been a significant presence in the locales that homesteaders would describe as uninhabited. Still, some readers will wonder why Wilder is taking so long to appear in a book that has her name on its cover. On several other occasions, the main characters vanish, yielding their place to long expository passages of American history.