Cindy Wilson to Present at the 2025 Laura Day Celebration

Cindy Wilson to Present at the 2025 Laura Day Celebration

Posted: January 1, 2025

Smiling woman with short blond hair and glasses, wearing a blue top, outdoors with blurred greenery.

“The Hard Winter of 1880-1881”

Join us on Saturday, June 28, when author and historian Cindy Wilson will join us to talk about the real history of the Hard Winter of 1880-1881, which Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote about in The Long Winter.

She’ll talk about the weather and the railroads, share some interesting stories from the winter, and show some amazing photographs taken in March and April of 1881 that show why the trains could not get west to towns like De Smet.

If you have time, reread The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder before the event, available in the museum’s gift shop, as is The Beautiful Snow by Cindy Wilson.

Cindy is the author of the award-winning books The Beautiful Snow: The Ingalls Family, the Railroads, and the Hard Winter of 1880-81 and We Suffered Much: Charles Wood Irish and the Dakota Territory Railroad Survey of 1879-1881.

You can learn more at cindywilson-author.com.

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