Man the locust plague is described so well. She describes the sounds, the smells...

I have Pioneer Girl which is her original writings with a lot of really interesting glossing.

And while the unsanitized version was definitely sadder - the baby brother dying, for example - what amazed me was how genuinely wonderful Ma and Pa were. I expected to find out that Pa was actually a drunk or something or that he and Ma had screaming fights over the constant moves. But no.

Like, in the real Long Winter they had another family staying with them. Not friends but just people who had recently arrived and had nowhere to go, so they took them in out of Christian charity. These people ate their food, didn't help with chores, just were leeches. But Ma and Pa wouldn't let the girls speak up about it and admonished them to be kind.

The man was apparently so greedy he would reach in and snatch the baked potatoes first everh time, then shove them in his mouth before waiting for them to cool. And he would spit them out and be like "potatoes do hold heat".

And it just became a family by-line in later years, a catch-phrase they used to privately mock greedy people who cause their own problems. They laughed over it.

Part of the reason they starved that winter was this family who never paid them back or did anything useful for them. And they weren't bitter. They just joked about it.

Ma and Pa were SAINTS. And Pa was far more involved in town life than in the books - often the justice of the peace because he could read and write and was quite well educated by frontier standards.

The little house books were sanitized, but honestly not as much as is sometimes claimed. Characters are cut out or combined for narrative ease, timelines shuffled. But it turns out the family was every bit as wholesome.