Here's Where It Gets Interesting - Missouri: The Little House Like You’ve Never Heard with Natalie Franke

Episode Date: November 10, 2021

In this episode, Sharon is joined by Natalie Franke, founder of the Rising Tide Society and author of the new book Built to Belong, to learn about Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House children's book series. Chronicling the life of a pioneer family living on the prairies in the Midwest during the great westward expansion, the Little House series is a children’s book collection that was later adapted into a popular television series and was first published in 1932. It is estimated that the Little House franchise is worth over $100 million today. Listen to learn more about which family member was Laura Ingalls Wilder’s ghostwriter for the series, the little-known adult life of Laura Ingalls Wilder, how the Wilder family was connected to the rise of libertarianism in the United States, and who owns the copyright to the Little House series in 2021. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey friends, thank you for joining me today. I am chatting with my friend author, Natalie Frank, and she has written just a fantastic book called Built to Belong. Hope you read it. I also want to share a story with you and her today about Laura Ingalls Wilder that is going to give you so many brain tingles, I can almost promise you, you don't know what I am going to share about the Wilder family. So let's do it. Let's dive into Libertarians on the Prairie. I'm Sharon McMahon, and welcome to the Sharon Says So podcast. Natalie, you're here and I'm so excited. Oh, I'm so excited to be here. Thank you for having me.

Oh, it's absolutely my pleasure. What a delight you are. I love your feed. I love your work. Tell everybody what you do. I am a community builder and a mama bear for small business. I have built a community of over 70,000 small business owners that span the globe in spite for this mindset of community over competition. So we're going into highly competitive spaces. We're forging connections, building relationships, and really working to raise the tide for all small businesses around the world. And you started the Rising Tide Society. Yeah. And that's truly the heart and soul of what I do. And just seeing

the power that comes from people pursuing their passion and turning it into a sustainable livelihood and the legacy change that that brings not just to their family, but to their community. It is such an honor to be a part of that and to support that community. Your book just came out. I have three copies. I've one that you sent me and two that I bought. So tell everybody about your new book built to belong. Yes. My book built to belong, discovering the power of community over competition is all about addressing the competition and the comparison that confronts us every single day in our lives. And not only rising above it as individuals, but actually rising above it together as the collective and seeing the power in forging relationships,

seeing the opportunity that comes when instead of being pit against one another, we really look to one another as part of the same team and changing our mindsets about how competition operates in our lives to bring about a better future. I love it. I have a very interesting story to share with you today. I'm excited to dive in and share the story with you about the state of Missouri and about somebody that you, I'm absolutely certain you already know who she is, but I'm going to hopefully give you some mind blown brain tangle moments when you find out some of the stuff I'm about to share. I'm so excited.

Did you grow up reading or watching the Little House on the Prairie series? I did. My grandmother sent me the whole book collection. You're probably too young to have watched Little House on the Prairie on TV though, right? Yeah, no, I never watched it on TV as far as I can remember. One of the things that I think is interesting is that Laura Ingalls Wilder didn't start writing her books until she was 65. I hear this all the time from people. I bet you do too, that people feel like, is it too late for me to follow my dreams? Is it too late for me to pursue something I'm interested in? Well, the answer is no. She was 65 and she didn't stop writing the little house series until she was in her seventies.

Oh, I love it. I love this already. Sharon, you have me already. Okay. So we all know that Laura Ingalls Wilder lived in, you know, little house in the big woods. They lived in Wisconsin. lived in Little House in the Big Woods. They lived in Wisconsin. They moved to Minnesota. They moved to Kansas, Iowa, South Dakota, as they were kind of pursuing their dream of freedom and finding a place to farm and all of the things that Pa Ingalls wanted to pursue. And of course, her books were really centered around her childhood and her adolescence. And then they kind of leave off after she and Almanzo get married and they have one child together. They have one daughter named Rose. They actually had a second child, a baby boy who ended up passing away shortly after birth, but they had one child together named Rose.

ended up passing away shortly after birth, but they had one child together named Rose. And as I was diving into this story, Rose Wilder Lane, she really emerged as one of the central characters of the story in a very unexpected way. Just to give you a little bit more background, we always think about the Little House books being set in the upper Midwest, like I just mentioned, Minnesota, Wisconsin, South Dakota, but Laura Ingalls Wilder actually lived the vast majority of her life in Mansfield, Missouri. And that is where all of her books were written. That was where she moved when she was a young woman and died in Missouri. So Missouri really plays such an important part of her story. And it is where Rose spent most of her childhood. After Laura and Almanzo got married, their first few years of

marriage were disastrous. Of course, you don't wish harm on anybody, but this is another example of how you can come back from disaster and become Laura Ingalls Wilder and sell 60 million books. In the first few years of their marriage, this is just a short synopsis of the things that happened to them. They get married. They decide they're going to try farming. Hale destroyed their wheat crop. Their barn burned down along with all of the grain and hay they had stored in it. Both Laura and Almanzo got diphtheria. And then Almanzo tried to go back to work too quickly, like he was weak from being sick. And he had a stroke that left him partially paralyzed for the rest of his life.

He was, you know, kind of a broad, strong young man. And then over time, as he leaned more on his cane, he became more hunched, had less strength in his legs. So his physical abilities were hampered for the rest of his life from this diphtheria related illness. They then lost their next two crops, their baby son died and their two-year-old daughter Rose accidentally set their house on fire and burned the entire thing down. And they literally lost everything. That is all just like within a handful of years. I feel like a lot of us can relate to that after 2020. 2020 was all of our houses burning down basically. But it felt like, yeah. It's the meme of the dog, you know, in the room and everything's on fire and they're like,

it's fine. I'm fine. Everything's fine. You know? So Almanzo and Laura, they called each other Manny and Bess. Those were their nicknames for each other. And they saw an advertisement and it said, among the Ozarks, the land of big red apples. And that just really appealed to them. The idea of big red apples, man, that sounded good after what they had been through. And so they scraped together some money doing odd jobs. Laura was a seamstress. Belmanso did all kinds of little

odd jobs to try to earn money. They scraped together a hundred dollars and moved to Missouri and put a down payment on 40 acres of land. And they lived in a tiny little two room house while they were trying to get their farm going. They eventually kind of moved into town while they were trying to build up their farm and their farm was primarily going to be poultry, dairy, and fruit. They were kind of done with the idea of like, we're going to grow big fields of wheat. They pivoted. That's right. That's right. Obviously you can't just plant an apple tree and be like, we're rich from apple trees. It takes a long time for the apple trees to grow large enough to bear fruit. This is the 2021 equivalent of the gig economy where they, they were just like,

let's do all the odd jobs to cobble together a living. In 1910, so they have now been living in Missouri for a number of years. Laura Ingalls Wilder starts writing a column for a magazine and also columns for newspapers. And they were magazines and newspapers aimed at farmers. One of them was called the Missouri Ruralist. One of them was called Country Gentleman, the St. Louis star farmer. And what she had become an expert at was raising leghorn chickens. And so she started writing all of these articles about chickens and here's what you do if this is happening in your chicken coop. And she published all of her articles under the pseudonym of A.J. Wilder because she felt, of course, like writing the word Laura before her name automatically discredited her. When in fact,

she was an expert at raising leghorn chickens enough that she started getting all of these writing jobs. Nevertheless, it was still largely a life of poverty by today's definition. They did not have much. They were able to put a little bit away here and there, but their daughter Rose talked later about how ashamed she was of their poverty. Sometimes she legitimately would go to school without shoes. Sometimes she would have to ride a donkey to school. I mean, this is like the old, you didn't have a bad, I had a bad, I walked to school uphill, both ways, waist deep snow, barefoot. You know what I mean? Like, except Rose Wilder actually did that. She rode a donkey. The donkey's name was Spookendike.

And I thought that was funny. Like, that's a funny name. She wrote a donkey. The donkey's name was Spookendike. And I thought that was funny. Like that's a funny name. Never heard that before when she was 15. However, Rose was done. She was like, get me out of this small town in Missouri where nothing ever happens. And we are poor as all get out. And she went to Louisiana to live with her aunt that Laura did not like, Almanzo's sister. They never got along. But she knew that Rose was going to go with her without her permission. So she went to Louisiana. And while she was there, Rose decided to try her hand at writing and started submitting

stories to various magazines. Of course, magazines were a big deal then, and they would serialize stories. It would be like chapter one came this month, chapter two will come next month. So she starts making a name for herself as a young woman with her writing career. She eventually met a man named Claire Lane, and they moved to San Francisco where she became a reporter and started working for newspapers out in California. And there are letters between Laura and Rose where Laura went out to visit Rose. She had a good time in California. I've never seen such a thing. You can imagine Laura Ingalls Wilder getting to San Francisco, which is one of the largest cities in America at that time, and seeing the ocean. That had to be quite the journey for her. Sadly, Rose and her husband did not fare well, and they ended up

getting a divorce. By the early 1920s, Rose was very disillusioned with her life in the United States, and she decided she wanted to travel more. She had wanderlust, and she decided to move to Europe. While she is traveling around Europe, she meets friends on a train. She's written a book actually about her journeys in Europe. She had a lot of adventures there. Somebody there mentioned to her how amazing Albania was. And she was like, well, I'll give it a try. And she moved to Albania and absolutely loved it and was there for like on and off for eight years. Her writing career continued to skyrocket.

She was writing articles for Cosmopolitan magazine. She was writing articles for McCall. She ended up becoming one of the highest paid authors of the time. She would get paid over a thousand dollars to write one magazine article in the 1920s. Wow. Which is crazy, right? Like today, if somebody was like, Hey, do you want to write an article for $1,200? A lot of us would be like, heck yeah, I do. Yeah, for sure. For sure. And she's like the original remote worker. She was, she was a remote worker in Albania sending her stories overseas. Eventually, you know, sending her stories overseas. Eventually, you know, her time in Albania and she returns back to Missouri and her mother's getting older. She decided she was going to take some of her money and she was going to build a new modern house on their farm property. They had a farm

house that they had expanded over time. It is now a historic site and you can visit it in Missouri. But if you look at pictures of the Wilder farmhouse, it is very kind of haphazard looking. It does not look like it was constructed with any kind of master plan because it wasn't. They just tacked on rooms as they had money. And if you look at it now, it's just like a little thing over here, little thing over here. It does not look like any kind of design went into it. But Rose decided that she would build her family a beautiful stone cottage and that

it would have electricity and it would have all of the comforts that she wanted her parents to have. Downside of this was that she never actually asked her parents, hey, do you guys want a new house? Because Laura felt like it was a waste of money. She felt like, why would you have spent all this money on brand new furniture? It's too fancy for me. I mean, this is a person who grew up living at the covered wagon, right?

You know, so to move into these surroundings actually was very disconcerting, especially when she had not been consulted. And one of the things that is very true about Rose and Laura, and this is well evidenced by every single biographer, all their letters between each other is that they had a contentious relationship with each other. Both of them were very strong-willed. And this was not a case of Rose just being like, oh my gosh, my mom is the best. I love her so much. I need to build her a house because I've made it. It was more like, there is not enough space here for everybody. So I'm going to get

you guys a different house to live in. That was more the attitude. And of course, Laura could sense that. Of course, Laura continues to write all of her articles. She found some success in writing articles about her childhood. And some of the articles she wrote were called things like when grandma was a girl, they were aimed at like what it was like to live in a covered wagon and travel across the Prairie and all of these kinds of things. And Rose had top tier agents. She had all the connections in publishing and she really encouraged her mom. You should write a book of these stories. And so Laura did. Laura wrote like a 400 plus page book called Pioneer Girl, but it was written for an adult audience. It was not written for children and

nobody wanted it. Not one publisher wanted it. Rose sent it to her agents. Her agents were like, I don't know what we're going to do with this. I don't know if anybody's going to buy this book. This is not going to be a commercial success. Ultimately, to make a long story short, Rose gets the idea that Laura should try to rewrite these stories, not from an autobiographical perspective of, and then I got into the wagon, but from a third person narrative where it seems like you're telling the story of somebody else and that she should rewrite the books for children. They embarked on this journey, Rose and Laura did, of writing to all of Laura's remaining relatives and saying, tell me everything you remember about when my family lived in Wisconsin because Laura was like four. You know what I mean? And so she's going to have different memories as a child than her mother's sister would as an adult.

Laura's parents were dead, but she wrote to all of her aunts and uncles and said, literally write down everything you can remember, like the colors of our clothes, what we were wearing, what the weather was like, send me back all the memories. colors of our clothes, what we were wearing, what the weather was like, send me back all the memories. So she then goes on this expedition of trying to gather as many facts as she can about what it was like to live back then, because she's now a 60 plus year old woman. And this was happening 55 years ago. And despite your amazing memories, again, you're viewing the world through your childlike lens at the time. I can't even remember what I did last week. So I have so much respect already for any sense of memory of many years ago, but yes, yes. Sorry. No. How would Laura have known how a covered wagon

would have been constructed? She was a child. It was not her business to know those things. How would she have known how Pav built a house? You know, like she might remember that it was like some logs, but all those details that now accurately portray how these things took place, she garnered from other people because she was a child when all of these things were happening. Her first book, which was Little House in the Big Woods, she wrote down all of her memories. Rose said to her, just get it out. Just write it all down. Write down every detail you can remember. And Laura sat in her house with a yellow pad of paper and a pencil and to save money, wrote on the front side and the back side of every single piece of paper. She had a sense of urgency about this, a sense of like, we should try to get this written and try to sell these stories because the Wilder family and Rose had lost almost everything in the 1929 stock market crash.

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ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. Rose had invested a lot of her money with an investment broker. And while things were good, she was making a lot of money and she encouraged her parents to invest. And then once the stock market crash happened, Rose had to call her parents and say, there was almost nothing left. crash happened, Rose had to call her parents and say there was almost nothing left. This fire was lit underneath them to try to get these books written because they felt like we need the money and things like social security and all that stuff didn't exist yet. Little House in the Big Woods was a massive commercial success, massive. And the publishers were like, how quickly can you turn around the next story? Meanwhile, this is where things started to get really interesting to me. Of course, the books are wonderful tales. Do they have problematic stereotypes of Native

Americans by today's standards? They absolutely do. Her perspective on that is not the perspective we share today. And yet there's such sweetly told stories about her daily life that they're obviously very beloved and have been for decades. But one of the things that I found very interesting, and now it makes me want to go back and reread this entire series, is that both Rose and Laura absolutely hated FDR, and they were extremely into libertarian politics. No way. Yes, especially Rose. Rose felt like FDR was a dictator. She hated the New Deal. FDR was a dictator. She hated the New Deal. She, in one letter, said that she wished FDR would be assassinated, or she kind of joked, I might like to do it myself. She absolutely hated him. And now you can see many of the themes of libertarianism, which if somebody is listening, doesn't know what that is.

It is the idea to have as little government as possible so that individuals have as much liberty as possible to choose what it is that they want to do. So the New Deal was the opposite of that. The New Deal greatly expanded and created big government. And Rose wanted there to be almost no government. In fact, at one point, she felt like democracy was a bad idea because it just created more government. People would just vote for more government. That's very strange to think about today, but that was her belief. So these are some of the themes that are present in libertarianism, present in Rose's writing about

libertarianism. And now you can see them in the Little House stories, which are self-reliance, property rights, limited government, the free market. In fact, there's one exchange between Pa and another man in the long winter in which the shop owner is trying to jack up the prices for the remaining wheat that he has. And there's almost a riot. Everybody's like, you can't do that. You can't charge more money. We're all starving. And Pa says to all the people in the shop, it's a free country and every man's got a right to do with his own property as he pleases. Don't forget that every one of us is free and independent. So this pioneer ideal of spontaneous order that people left to their own devices will

naturally make good choices. You can see that present throughout the entire series. And that is due in large part because so much of what we know as the Little House series was shaped by Rose. We think that, you know, Laura sat with her legal pad and just wrote out the whole story. And in reality, it was Rose who was the famous writer. And it was Rose who spent all of the time retyping her mother's stories, revising them, moving them around, taking things out, rewriting the dialogue, making that dramatic tension. It was Rose who knew how to craft a story, but it was Laura with the memories. So this was very much a collaboration

between the two of them that Rose in many ways resented because she did not get any credit for it. She did not get to further her career in any way. She felt like it was her duty to help her mother, but she didn't particularly like it. She felt like it was a burden on her. In order to make money, we have to get these books done. I've got to rewrite my mother's memoirs. Biographers of Rose in a book, The Ghost in the Little House. They talk about how Rose in many ways was her mother's ghostwriter. And when The Ghost in the Little House came out, the author was inundated with hate mail. People hated him because they had this very idealized version of Laura in their minds. And they felt like you are wrecking it with Rose and her politics and the fact that she

doesn't get along with her mom. And the fact that these stories were shaped so strongly by Rose leaves the idea that these are just the sweet childhood memories of Laura kind of on the table. And it makes you rethink how much of this is actually Laura's memory and how much of this is dramatic tension written by Rose, who was a famous and fantastic author. Rose, by the way, was hired to write things like biographies of Herbert Hoover, biographies of Henry Ford and Charlie Chaplin. When I say that she was a very accomplished writer, she absolutely was. Laura did have the memories, but it was Rose with all of the writing

skills. This is another thing that I found very interesting, which was there were a lot of stories that Rose took out of the Little House series. They were in Laura's book, Pioneer Girl, which has been released, by the way, that came out a number of years ago. But Rose was like, this is not appropriate for children. There were several stories. One of them was about a man who set himself on fire. There were lots of terrible farm accidents in Laura's Pioneer Girl where people died grisly deaths. But there was one story that I was like, what? And Laura told this story at a book event because of course, Laura became a famous author. She got invited to a book event in New York City. That's like a 70-year-old woman. And she is

speaking before this group of people talking about what it's been like to write her books. And she told one of the stories that she was not able to include about a family called the Bender family. And they were a family that owned an inn at a small town that Laura's family passed through frequently. And Pa had always noticed that this hotel had a large garden and that the ground was always tilled in the garden, but that nothing was ever planted in the garden. The ground always looked ready to go, but nothing ever grew in it, no matter how many times they pass by. Well, Laura found out later that this family would kill their guests with an ax and bury them in their garden plot, which is why there was nothing ever growing, but the garden always looked dug up. And so whether or not that story is true, I don't know, but Laura told that to a group of people. Laura believed it was true.

Whether or not that was a story that her parents just told her as a child, you know, like, I don't know that any independent verification of this Bender family that owned it in and killed all their guests and buried in the garden plot. I don't know if that's true or not, but Laura believed it was and Rose had to take it out of the little house series. Oh my gosh. Sharon, I feel like this is a murder mystery waiting to happen. Your next podcast is the Bender family murder mystery. I need to find the deets on this family. In 1943, Rose wrote a libertarian book called The Discovery of Freedom. And she, along with her friend Ayn Rand, is considered the mother of the libertarian movement in the United States.

She supported the school called the Freedom School in Colorado. She became moderately obsessed with libertarianism. In fact, during World War II, she refused to get a ration card, you know, where you were allocated a certain amount of dairy products, fruit, gasoline, et cetera. She refused to get a ration card because she felt like there is no way I will allow the government to tell me what to do. And if that means I go without butter, then I'll just buy myself a cow. Oh my word. My great grandparents owned a gas station and I hear stories all the time about my great grandmother and the ration cards. It was a scary time to tell people I have to shut off your gas, you know, and that's all you can get. And I can only imagine someone basically saying,

you know what, you're not going to tell me what to do. And if I have to walk, I'll walk. Yeah, she did. Think about it. Rose grew up walking without shoes. That was, she wasn't afraid of walking. Oh my word, what a time. By the way, Rose as a young woman was a dead ringer for Maggie Gyllenhaal. Ooh. If you look at pictures of them side by side, like when they're similar ages, like Maggie Gyllenhaal, I don't know how old she is now. 30 something. If you look at Rose, ages, like Maggie Gyllenhaal, I don't know how old she is now, 30 something. If you look at Rose, when she was in her thirties, you were like, dang, they could absolutely be sisters. They look so much alike. But anyway, there are photographs of Rose testifying before Congress as an older woman. She is wearing like a black pinstripe suit. She has like on a red flower,

she has a little hat on. And she was there to testify in favor of something called the Ludlow Amendment. And the Ludlow Amendment, which was not passed, said that there needed to be a national referendum before Congress could declare war. Like if we're going to get involved in a war, the whole country better vote on it. And that obviously did not pass, but she believed that the government of the United States should not be getting involved in foreign countries. That is another libertarian belief that we protect the homeland only we do not insert ourselves into the affairs of other countries. In the 1950s, Laura died right after her 90th birthday, peacefully in her sleep at her home in Missouri.

Rose had moved to Connecticut. She came home to visit pretty frequently, but she spent a lot of time in Connecticut, Rose did. Almanzo had already died. He had died several years before. But when Laura died, she gave all of the proceeds, copyrights, et cetera, of the Little House books to Rose, her only heir. I also found it interesting that Laura had a number of sisters. She had Carrie, Mary, and Grace, and she had a baby brother who also died.

But none of her three sisters had any children. And Laura had only one child. of her three sisters had any children and Laura had only one child. Rose was pregnant when she was married and the baby was born prematurely stillborn and Rose never had any other children. So Rose took charge of Laura's literary estate. You have to renew the copyright of your work every so often. And Laura had renewed the copyright shortly before she died, with the exception of two books whose copyright were not up for renewal yet, the two latest books that she had written. Rose took over doing all of these things. And never having had any children, all of her family being gone, she had developed a close relationship with this man named Roger McBride, who was a student of

libertarianism, just like Rose was. And they were kind of two peas in a pod. He considered her kind of like an adopted grandmother. And when Rose died in 1968, she left all of her estate to Roger McBride. I should also mention that in Laura's will, she said that Rose would have a lifetime interest in her Little House works. And when Rose died, the Little House series would go to the Mansfield Public Library that Laura helped to fund. She helped found and fund this library. So she wanted the library to have the copyright of her work after Rose died because there were no more heirs. The problem then became there was a conflict between federal copyright law and Rose's will. After Rose died and Roger inherited all of her belongings, he quickly took the copyrights for the two remaining books who had not had their copyright renewed because they were not up yet, and transferred them into his name. Because federal copyright law supersedes individual wills, Roger then became owner of the

entire Little House franchise. It was him then that turned and made Little House into a TV series. After a period of time, the Mansfield Public Library was like, weren't we supposed to get the copyright of these books? Like we have a hole in the ceiling. There's literally like water everywhere. Laura left us those things. This is part of our legacy. So they filed a lawsuit against Roger McBride. This is in the late 1990s by this point. It was estimated that the Little House franchise was worth $100 million at that point. They filed a lawsuit against him and also HarperCollins, who was the publisher of this franchise. They also accused him of misappropriating some of the funds from the Little House franchise because Roger had decided in the using the funds from Laura to run for president. And she would not have liked that. And that's not what her will said, et cetera, et cetera.

By the way, this is another interesting side note. Roger attended the School of Freedom in Colorado that I mentioned that Rose was a big proponent of. And while Roger was there, he met the Koch brothers who own the Koch Industries, one of the largest privately held companies in the United States today. They're still very big into libertarian politics. They spend hundreds of 2020. They have a political action committee called the Americans for Prosperity Institute, and they filed a lawsuit about California donor reporting laws, and they won. So Laura and Rose have a little connection to the Koch brothers via Roger McBride.

So Roger died and left his entire fortune to his only child, who was named Abigail Adams McBride. And in the early 2000s, like around 2001, the public library settled with Harper Collins and settled with Abigail McBride, who's now married. Abigail Allen is her name. And it's reported, this is not made public, but this is reported that they settled for $875,000. That was the amount that they got. And Abigail now owns the entire Little House series. And when I tell you that I tried to find any information about her, I tried hard to find information about Abigail McBride Allen.

She is nowhere. All you can find is a few mentions of her name. You cannot find a picture of her. You cannot find an interview with her. You cannot find her on social media. She clearly wants to not be found. And that is probably her view as a libertarian, that it is her right to do that, that she has the freedom to do if she's a libertarian. I don't know because there's no information on her. libertarian. I don't know. Cause there's no information on her, but isn't that fascinating that Rose Wilder Lane is considered the mother of libertarian politics in the United States. I had no idea. No idea. I didn't either. Who knew all this was happening in Missouri. Now I want to go to Missouri. You've now sold me on Missouri, remote work from Albania.

You can be a famous author. One of the things that Rose wrote an article about for Cosmopolitan magazine, this was of course, before Cosmo is what it is now. You know, Cosmo was very different in the 1930s than it is now. I can imagine. I can imagine. Slightly different articles. You know, thirties than it is now. I can imagine. I can imagine. Slightly different articles. You know, because so much of America was rural, really aimed at bringing that kind of like more cosmopolitan vibe to the entirety of America. She wrote a story about how she tried to commit suicide and she was unsuccessful. And the article was about how she is now the happiest woman in America because she was not successful in killing herself. Wow. It's so interesting. Wow. I appreciate it. That was phenomenal. And I still, I'm still

curious. I'm still stuck on Abigail Allen. If you're listening to this, Abigail, right? Please get in touch. Yeah, please reach out to Sharon. That's right. I don't have to show your picture. I won't tell anybody where you live. She did grow up in Virginia. That we know because that's where Roger raised her. But what she's doing now with her little house on the Prairie fortune, when she is of no relation to the Wilder family at all, that is also just another interesting rabbit hole to go down. At all. That is also just another interesting rabbit hole to go down. How somebody who is of no relation can become the copyright holder of such important literary works. Amazing. Well, tell everybody where to find you, Natalie, because they need to be following you,

especially if you are a small business owner, you have got to hop on your train. So tell everybody where to find you. Yes. So you can find me all over the interwebs at Natalie Frank. Frank has an E at the end, nataliefrank.com. And if you want to learn more about Built to Belong, it is wherever books are sold, wherever you buy your books, bonus points for all of you who shop independent and just, you know, encouraging all the small business centers to reach out and connect. And there are places online where you can buy books from independent booksellers online now. You don't have to buy from Amazon. You certainly don't. Although the book is worth it wherever you end up buying it.

Thanks, Sharon. Thank you so much, Natalie. This was fantastic. I loved it. Thank you so much, Natalie. This was fantastic. I loved it. Thank you for having me. Oh, and what a story. What a good one. What a good one.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening to the Sharon Says So podcast. I am truly grateful for you. And I'm wondering if you could do me a quick favor. Would you be willing to follow or subscribe to this podcast or maybe leave me a rating or review? Or if you're feeling extra generous, would you share this episode on your Instagram stories or with a friend? All of those things help podcasters out so much. I cannot wait

to have another mind blown moment with you next episode. Thanks again for listening to the Sharon podcast. you