from the books I certainly think of Laura as more rebellious than cheerful. Maybe not sullen, but stubborn and independent.

There's a great photo of Mary, Laura, and Carrie taken right after the Long Winter that shows them perfectly as Laura describes them in that book and the following one. Carrie is as frail-looking as Laura says she was after the hardships of that year. Mary is as indomitable a figure as she always appeared to me post-blindness (look at how firm and resolute she appears!). And Laura's eyes are flashing and her hand is clenched in a fist at her side, just as I always saw her in my mind.

All those other kids came from god knows where

Central Casting? (sorry, couldn't resist)

I did watch the show in its first few years, but not much sticks in my mind. I do remember one show when Laura and a friend - a boy? - had either been reading penny dreadfuls, dime novels, or had been listening to stories about someone lurking around. They got so overly terrified about it that at some point they nail Pa with a bucket or something of paint. (ah yes, I remember it well)

I'd never seen that picture! They all look just how the books described them, you're right.

Toddson, I don't remember that one, actually. It's obviously been years since I've seen it and I was very young at the time, but it's the really weird stuff that stuck with me. Like the time Ma tries to cut her own leg off.

Like the time Ma tries to cut her own leg off.

I remember a Bonanza episode where Little Joe is contemplating doing the same thing--gah, that's a 40-year-old memory.

it's the really weird stuff that stuck with me. Like the time Ma tries to cut her own leg off.

Or the time that Albert's girlfriend (who he hasn't slept with and they are about 12) gets pregnant, and everyone thinks it is Albert's baby. But it turns out that the Blacksmith has been raping her wearing a clown/mime mask.

(also, I was thinking the whole time that her father was molesting her)

YES! The Television Without Pity thread was called "LHotP: Ma, Pa, and the Mime Who Raped Sylvia"

Who thinks of things like that?

Actually, the whole "12-y.o." thing does appear in the book in a completely different format. Lena (Laura's cousin) and Laura go to get Lena's family's clothes from the laundress (Lena's mom helps out with making food for the railroad workers, so she doesn't have time to wash clothes). The laundress tells them that she's been a bit swamped since her 12-y.o. daughter just got married that weekend. Lena and Laura are silent on the way back to the camp, since they are 13 and 11 years old, respectively. It's the first hint at adulthood for Laura in the books.

For anyone looking to read the Little House books for the first time, or revisiting them for the first time as an adult, just to let you know that LIW wrote them so that they start out at a young reading level and get progressively more advanced, or at least they were edited in this way. It's a great idea for young readers, but it does make the early books a bit elementary for adult readers.

Some days, I think that's all I'd be able to comprehend ... maybe I should read some of them.

I can't recommend them enough, as you can probably tell! They're just fascinating to me.

It's really neat to find out as an adult that the very PC inclusion of the black doctor in Little House on the Prairie is actually historically accurate; Dr. Tan is listed on the same 1870 census page as the Ingalls family.

Mr. Edwards has never been pinned down to a specific person, unfortunately, but Nellie Olsen has been identified as being an amalgamation of three girls that Laura knew at various points of her youth, and Mr. Brewster, the homesteader whom Laura roomed with at her first teaching job, had his name changed by her due to the stark honesty of how LIW depicted the really bad marriage he was in (he was the one whose wife was threatening him with a knife in the wee hours of a cold winter morning while Laura hid behind the curtain separating her bed from theirs). (IRL, he was Mr. Boast's cousin, IIRC.)