Gritty realities of life on Wilder's prairie unearthed

The Little House on the Prairie book was a sanitised version of events.

In her beloved Little House series of books, Laura Ingalls Wilder painted a wholesome picture of prairie life in which the most scandalous event was rival Nellie Olsen pulling her pigtails.

But the reality behind Laura's life with her pioneer parents and three sisters as they travelled across the American West, documented in the Little House on the Prairie television series as well as her eight books for children, was rather more gritty.

Now the full story of Wilder's early life is to be told for the first time with the publication of an autobiography, A Pioneer Girl, which she originally wrote for an adult audience before adapting it for children in the Little House series.

The unsanitised version of events includes tales which were stripped out of the children's books, including an episode in which a drunken neighbour batters his wife, details of an ill-fated love triangle and even a scene where Laura's supposedly saintly Pa, her father, Charles Ingalls, ducks paying the family's rent.

Wilder began writing about her early life at the height of the Depression in 1930, recalling her days as the daughter of a pioneer family travelling west before eventually settling in De Smet, South Dakota, in 1870.

Unable to find a publisher, she and her daughter Rose Wilder Lane turned her stories into a series of children's books beginning with Little House in the Big Woods, which was followed by the most popular edition, Little House on the Prairie.

The books left out much of the harsh truth of prairie living, making some characters out of amalgams of real-life people and, in many cases, editing events to make a better story.

Preserved for decades at the Laura Ingalls Wilder Historic Home and Museum in Mansfield, Missouri, the unedited draft is being released by the South Dakota State Historical Society Press as Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography and includes the original misspellings and idiosyncrasies.

Pamela Smith Hill, who has written a biography of Wilder and is the lead editor on the autobiography, said: "You can read Pioneer Girl as non-fiction rather than fiction and get a better feeling of how the historical Ingalls family really lived, what their relationships were and how they experienced the American West."

According to those who have read it, the autobiography includes the story of a love triangle "gone awry", although the characters who were involved have not yet been disclosed.

In another incident, while living in Burr Oak, Iowa - a period of time not referred to in the children's books - a neighbour sets fire to his bedroom while drunk on whisky and drags his wife around by her hair until Charles Ingalls intervenes.

Far from being the God-fearing and saintly father figure of the books and television show, Pa was a rather more irascible figure in real life, once skipping out on paying the rent after falling out with his landlord, whom he described as a "rich old skinflint".