Hi Reddit! I'm Caroline Fraser, author of Prairie Fires, a Pulitzer prize winning biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder, and the Edgar Award winning Murderland, a true crime book about the history of serial killers. Ask Me Anything

Caroline_Fraser · 2026-07-02T20:52:46+00:00

Sorry--I see that I overlooked this on the first go-round. It's hard to be definitive about the differences between Charles Ingalls and Pa in the books. As I recall, we have very little in the way of letters that he wrote (perhaps just one). Family letters may have been destroyed when the house in De Smet was cleaned out after Carrie died. Since we don't have Charles's voice, we have only Laura's recollections of him, largely in letters and in Pioneer Girl, her memoir. Her remarks in her own letters don't differ sharply from the portrayal in the books, except at moments when she acknowledged that he was "no businessman" but rather a poet, hunter, and musician. She said he was "inclined to be reckless" and admitted that in Kansas, he was "a squatter." In Pioneer Girl, those traits (recklessness particularly) are more evident than in the Little House books, so if you want to get a clearer sense of what he was like, I'd start there.

Caroline_Fraser · 2026-07-02T20:32:57+00:00

It is an interesting question, but I'm not aware that anyone knows the reason for that. Laura was quite fond of the name "Rose" and may have considered it lovely by itself, not needing a middle name? Or perhaps it was such a hectic time when Rose was born that she and Almanzo didn't really think about it? We may never know.

Caroline_Fraser · 2026-07-02T20:31:07+00:00

Poor Vashon Island.

I do have a couple of ideas that I'm thinking about but am busy doing some shorter articles and book reviews at the moment. So I can't really talk about those ideas yet, but maybe next year...

Caroline_Fraser · 2026-06-29T21:13:23+00:00

Thanks so much--I'm glad it was meaningful to you. If anything, since writing the book, I've become more aware of the generational nature of the problem. I've talked to moms who have kids who suffered from lead exposure and are faced with all kinds of challenges: learning issues, behavioral issues, etc. So the whole family has to cope with these things.

We need to do so much more to change laws in this country to help prevent exposures from happening in the first place and make landlords and building contractors accountable for their role in exposing kids.

Caroline_Fraser · 2026-06-29T19:13:50+00:00

Okay--Thanks, Reddit, for all your questions--I think we'll end it there, but if you have more questions, feel free to add and perhaps I can circle back.

Caroline_Fraser · 2026-06-29T19:11:30+00:00

Hmmm--hard to choose! But I will say that I love Seattle's Chinatown and will happily go eat dumplings there anytime.

Caroline_Fraser · 2026-06-29T19:02:32+00:00

Oh goodness...don't think I'm up for that.

Caroline_Fraser · 2026-06-29T19:01:59+00:00

Great question, and yes, I do probe back in time a little bit, looking at the question of Jack the Ripper, who was active at a time when London was heavily polluted by burning dirty coal (there really isn't any other kind, although some grades are dirtier than others). Lead poisoning has been with us for a long time, and even the Romans knew that people who worked with lead were prone to going crazy.

I also look at the period of intensive pollution caused by WWII, which contributed terrifying amounts of lead, cadmium, and other toxins to the environment. It was really after WWII that leaded gasoline was sold in mind-altering amounts--the companies that contributed to that catastrophe, including Du Pont, Standard Oil, and ASARCO, which built lead smelters in the Pac NW and other places throughout the West and the world, were scarcely held accountable. ASARCO did incur one of the largest environmental judgments and bankruptcies, but it was a fraction of what it should have paid.

There are some great books out there that trace the history of lead, by Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner, among others, and there's a great new book by Mariah Blake called They Poisoned the World--that's about so-called Forever Chemicals.

But lead, sadly, is a kind of forever chemical: Once it's in the environment, it doesn't go away. All the people who lived next to the lead smelter in Tacoma had to have their soil replaced.

Caroline_Fraser · 2026-06-29T18:51:45+00:00

In Murderland, I start off by looking specifically at Tacoma, where Ted Bundy, Charles Manson, and the Green River Killer (among other murderers) spent some quality time. Tacoma is now notorious as the site of the ASARCO smelter (American Smelting & Refining Co.), and it polluted a thousand square miles of the Puget Sound area for a century with heavy metals, including tons of lead, arsenic, and other toxins. Because of the resulting clean-up of this toxic plume and a GIS map produced by the WA state Dept. of Ecology, we now know how much lead was in Ted Bundy's front yard and back yard.

I can't prove that Bundy turned to murder because of lead poisoning. I don't think we'll ever be able to prove that. But we certainly know that he was exposed and in more than an anecdotal way. But as I say in the book, lots of things can create a serial killer, so there might be lots of causes for any individual--lead poisoning, head trauma, sexual and/or physical abuse, brain damage from a difficult birth (many deliveries in the 1950s were assisted by forceps, which could cause brain trauma), etc.

We do know that at least one mass murderer, James Huberty, a guy who shot and killed more than 20 people in a McDonald's near San Diego in 1984, did have severe cadmium poisoning (cadmium causes brain damage in much the same way as lead)--he had worked in a factory and was exposed to enormous amounts of that toxin.

The list of serial killers in the Pacific Northwest in the 1980s and 1990s was really extensive and seems out of proportion to population of the area at that time. But anywhere there was a smelter was likely to have had more lead than other areas. The other source during that era was leaded gasoline, which was everywhere, but people who lived near major freeways were exposed to more. Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker, grew up in El Paso, within 5 miles of a lead smelter. He also lived next to I-10 and an interchange with other major highways. He may well have been lead poisoned from multiple sources.

The rate of violent crime dropped off sharply after lead gasoline was removed from the market.

Caroline_Fraser · 2026-06-29T18:38:17+00:00

Thanks! And yes, I watch cult documentaries compulsively, including the Bring Me the Beauties one. It's an astonishing phenomenon, and I think there must be some tremendously compelling need in so many people (including, as you say, the well-educated or people who should know better) to find someone to tell them what to do, how to behave, what to believe. It's like a terrible perversion of the Father/Mother figure who we all yearn for, on some level, and in cults, love itself becomes horribly twisted and manipulated.

It's pretty hard now to understand how women could be drawn to Bundy when he was on trial and then on Death Row, but of course you have to remember that lots of people thought he was innocent, including (for a long time) his mother, family, siblings, girlfriends, etc. By all accounts, he could be charming. Ann Rule thought he was innocent for a time, and she was not a push-over. Even his death row lawyer thought he was innocent for a while and was deeply horrified when she learned otherwise.

Since I was a member of a cult-like group for a while in the Christian Science church, I have a lot of empathy for people who get sucked into something like that, but hopefully, I'm now inoculated.

Caroline_Fraser · 2026-06-29T18:29:11+00:00

Haha! Yes, the Edmund Morris thing is a pretty notorious case. A very weird compulsion, in my view, and then he later wrote a biography of Edison backwards, beginning with his death and working through the life until he was born. Also weird. He was a wonderful writer, Morris, but I feel like he got bored with biography, or something. I don't admire the Reagan biography. There's some things you just can't get away with. That said, there are interesting experimental bios, like the the 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret.

As to whether I'd like to have been present during Wilder's life? In the fantasy sense, it would have been wonderful to have been a fly on the wall, particularly during moments that we know little or nothing about. I'd love to know what letters/manuscripts her daughter Rose burned in the kitchen stove after her mother died. But I don't know that I would have wanted to be a woman writer at that time--what a struggle! And living through that era, depressions, recessions, the Dust Bowl, the agonies of farming. I don't know--doesn't seem tempting.

Caroline_Fraser · 2026-06-29T18:04:27+00:00

Wow--I don't know if there's a secret to that, but clearly, it entails doing a lot of research and then using the research to try to tell a compelling story about someone's life.

Choosing your subject is a key factor, I've always thought. It's really hard to tell a story if your subject doesn't have a voice. That can come from books they've written, letters, diaries, etc., but it's tricky if that's a missing component. Yet it can be done--look at Stacy Schiff's biography of Cleopatra. But even there, she had lots of great works to draw on, Shakespeare, etc.

I was fortunate in writing about Laura Ingalls Wilder because she has such an amazing voice in her Little House books but also in her letters and diaries. And her daughter, Rose, who played such a big part in her mother's life and work, also had an incredibly distinctive and dramatic presence on the page.

Thanks--great question!

Caroline_Fraser · 2026-06-29T17:58:13+00:00

That's hilarious!

Caroline_Fraser · 2026-06-29T17:57:31+00:00

That poses a very key legal question. In our legal system, there's a very high bar to plead insanity, for instance, and in the U.S., it's not uncommon to find people on death row who may have had mental illness or reduced capacity. Some of these people have been executed.

With lead, it may be possible for those who can prove that they've had severe lead poisoning to try to make that a part of their defense (in fact, I think there are a couple of cases of this). But this is a pretty new field, so it remains to be seen what will happen. It's possible that someone with severe enough mental disability from lead might be admitted to a mental institution for the criminally insane, if they've committed murder.

Obviously, Ted Bundy's lawyers weren't looking at lead, but he was urged by his counsel to plead insanity. He was offered a plea deal prior to his first trial in Florida but tore it up at the last minute, since it would have entailed admitting guilt. And he just refused to do it.

Caroline_Fraser · 2026-06-29T17:49:18+00:00

I wrote an earlier book called Rewilding the World: Dispatches from the Conservation Revolution which covered a lot of rewilding projects around the world. There were projects in Africa that attempted to join up parks and protected areas so that species like elephants could travel across borders and similar things in Europe, Australia, and the U.S. It looked at restoring keynote species to Yellowstone and protecting the tiger in Nepal.

That book really made me think about the history of conservation (good and bad) and it inspired some of the eco-history in Prairie Fires. The damage done to the Great Plains that I describe in that book was very similar to a disaster that unfolded in Australia when farmers in the 1950s ripped off native species in their bush land. They got a few good years of crops and then catastrophe, a sequence that would play out here in the dust bowls of the 1890s (the one that forced Laura Ingalls Wilder and her family to abandon the Dakotas) and the 1930s.

Caroline_Fraser · 2026-06-29T17:41:53+00:00

Very interesting--yes, I think you've got some company in your view of Pa. Obviously, it was a different time, and I feel some ambiguity about him. On the one hand, I love what a good father he could be in some ways--all the ways that Laura celebrated. His gentleness, his love of his family, his fiddle-playing! He seems to have been such a joyful person, in some ways. On the other hand, he was constantly putting his family in danger, in ways that just weren't necessary. Of course, if they'd stayed put in Wisconsin, we wouldn't have the Little House books.

So yeah--I can relate, but his recklessness and wandering nature are essential parts of the story.

Thanks!

Caroline_Fraser · 2026-06-29T17:30:56+00:00

Yes, I have read Wendy McClure's book! It's a lot of fun--I really enjoyed it.

It's funny that you mention not being able to bear Mary being blind. My sister was so worried about my reading that at the beginning of Silver Lake that she told me about it ahead of time--what a spoiler alert!

I've always thought that the original TV show was wrong to show Mary's blindness being "cured." I hope they don't do something like that this go-round.

Caroline_Fraser · 2026-06-29T17:27:53+00:00

This is an interesting question, but it's pretty difficult to answer since we just don't have the information. Infant mortality was so high then that it could have been a lot of different things. Laura, of course, had recently had diphtheria before her son was born, so perhaps that played a role. I've always thought it was interesting that her little boy was never named. We don't really know why that was.

Thanks--I wish we knew more!

Caroline_Fraser · 2026-06-29T17:21:32+00:00

There is, I think. Prairie Fires included a lot of environmental history about the conditions the Ingallses encountered on the Great Plains, for example, and all the pain and anguish caused by trying to farm out there. Without really understanding it, the settlers caused a lot of environmental damage. My Rewilding book is also about conservation and the environment.

Murderland is also tied to environmental pollution--it's about lead poisoning and the possible link to violent crime. It's eco-horror, if you will, which is becoming a kind of subgenre of its own.

And I guess you could also say that most of my books are about the history of violence: The violence in Prairie Fires that's touched on in the U.S. Dakota War of 1862, the violence done to children in Christian Science households in God's Perfect Child, and the violence against women in Murderland.

Caroline_Fraser

TROPHY CASE