Young Pioneers (novel)

Young Pioneers (also known as Let the Hurricane Roar), a novel by Rose Wilder Lane. It contains some actual events from her mother's (Laura Ingalls Wilder) childhood.

The books has been adapted as a tv-series The Young Pioneers and two TV movies - Young Pioneers and Young Pioneers' Christmas.

Summary

Newlyweds Molly and David are only sixteen and eighteen years old when they pack up their wagon and head west across the plains in search of a new homestead. At first their new life is full of promise: The wheat is high, the dugout is warm and cozy, and a new baby is born to share in their happiness. Then disaster strikes, and David must go east for the winter to find work. Molly is left alone with the baby — with nothing but her own courage to face the dangers of the harsh prairie winter. Under Lane's original title Let the Hurricane Roar, the two characters are named "Charles" and "Caroline" which were the actual names of Lane's maternal grandparents - they were changed to "Molly" and "David" for the re-issue of the book as Young Pioneers.

Historical background

David is forced to go back east because of the grasshoppers plague. The very same thread is a part of her mother's "On the Banks of Plum Creek".

Both of those incidents actually happened to Laura when she was about seven and lived in Walnut Grove, Minnesota. Due to the grasshoppers, her father Charles Ingalls had to leave home and look for a job. Her mother, Caroline stayed with Laura and her two sisters, and they had to run the farm.

Young Pioneers (as "Let the Hurricane Roar") was first published in 1932 as a serial in The Saturday Evening Post while Laura Ingalls Wilder was writing Farmer Boy as a following novel to her Little House in the Big Woods which had already been published. Lane's "Hurricane" was also published as a novel in 1932.

Officially, the novel is not a part of the Little House series but is published by HarperTrophy as if it were.