In a condolence letter written to friends who had lost their three-month-old son in 1944, Rose Wilder Lane wrote, “My own baby died thirty-give years ago.”¹She provided no other details, although she added, “It isn’t true, what people say, that you will ever forget, but in time you do learn that unhappiness and loss are part of living, and that the sum-total of living, as it is, really is better than the happiness we imagine, want, and rebel against not having.”²

Lane rarely referred to the loss of her infant son. As she wrote her friend Dorothy Thompson during her pregnancy in 1930, “I think you don’t know that I once had a baby; no one I know now does know that, because I don’t speak about it.”³Lane’s biographer William Holtz characterizes the birth of her son as the “obscurest” episode in an obscure period of Lane’s life. “It was, apparently, an early death, a late miscarriage, or a stillbirth….”⁴

Even the child’s place of birth was unclear because Lane’s husband Gillette traveled frequently on business during the first year of the couple’s marriage. Did Lane travel with him or did she remain behind, presumably in Mansfield or Kansas City? The historical record simply wasn’t clear.

Recently, however, an important document has emerged that sheds new light on this episode in Lane’s life: the baby’s death certificate. It records that Infant Lane died on November 23, 1909. He had been born premature and stillborn in Salt Lake City, Utah, at Holy Cross Hospital. He was buried the next day. Here’s a link to the death certificate: http://archives.utah.gov/indexes/data/81448/2229322/2229322_0000278.jpg

While this new information answers some previously unanswered questions, several more remain unresolved. Why were Lane and her husband in Salt Lake? How long had they been there? How did Laura Ingalls Wilder and Almanzo react to the news? There are few surviving letters from this period between Lane and Wilder. Those housed at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, for example, are often undated, fragmented, and contain no specific references to Lane’s son.

It is important to note that Lane, who recorded so many details about her life, emotions, and feelings, left behind almost no documentation about what was clearly a significant episode in her life. But in her most enduring novel, Let The Hurricane Roar, Lane made a strategic and revealing autobiographical change in the fictional lives of her main characters, Charles and Caroline. Their infant son survives, and in the closing lines of the novel, Lane paints an optimistic future for their little boy and the world he will inherit, breaking the cord of infant losses that in real life had bound three generations of women together: Caroline Ingalls, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and Lane herself.

NOTES

1. Rose Wilder Lane to Charles and Joan Clark, February 8, 1944. Laura Ingalls Wilder Series, Rose Wilder Lane Papers, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, West Branch, Iowa.

2. Ibid.

3. Rose Wilder Lane to Dorothy Thomopson, March 8, 1930. Laura Ingalls Wilder Series, Rose Wilder Lane Papers, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, West Branch, Iowa.

4. William Holtz, The Ghost In The Little House: A Life of Rose Wilder Lane (Columbia: The University of Missouri Press, 1993), p. 51.