Talk:Charles Ingalls

Please fix.
The article says that the town he moved to in New York when he was a boy is west of Elgin IL. This is clearly not what was intended. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.34.105.24 (talk) 23:54, 27 May 2015 (UTC)

It clearly means that Camden Township is just west of Elgin, Illinois, not Cuba, NY....Camden Township is the last place mentioned in the sentence before the direction is given.

The article actually misses a few places where he moved the family. From Indian Territory they moved back to the Big Woods (Pepin, Wisconsin) for a while. The man who had bought their house & land there was unable to finish making his payments (must've entrusted one of their numerous relatives in the area to collect & keep the money for him), so they were able to return to their old home after evicting the guy. Then Peter Ingalls (his brother), his wife Eliza (Caroline's sister), & their 5 children, with whom they had been staying until the guy who defaulted moved out, decided to move just over the Wisconsin border to Minnesota, & the Charles Ingalls family sold their Wisconsin property again (hopefully he wasn't dumb enough to take just a down pymt that time) went with them. They found a large abandoned farmhouse near a lake (can't remember the name of that place), on which Peter Ingalls staked a claim. After wintering with them, the Charles Ingalls family then moved further south in Minnesota to Walnut Grove, then to Burr Oak, Iowa, where he had a job running a hotel, then went back to Walnut Grove again (Pa really wasn't a good provider; he got screwed on the deal by the hotel owner), until Henry Quiner (Caroline's brother) & his wife Polly (Charles's sister; yes, 3 Ingalls siblings married 3 Quiner siblings), who had moved to South Dakota, got Charles a job with the railroad. The family lived in a comfortable house provided by the railroad, until Charles staked a claim & built a shanty just outside of DeSmet. He also bought a town lot & bult a small house there for the winters, as a claim shanty is just what it sounds like, a basic shack, not suitable for winters, & there was the danger that they could get marooned here for months in a hard winter (as did happen, described in the book The Long Winter). The Homestead Act only said there had to be a shanty built & the acreage farmed for 5 yrs. It wasn't until his claim was 'proven' & he received the deed from the Homestead Office that he actually built a house on his farmland (guess he learnt his lesson in Kansas). ScarletRibbons (talk) 21:22, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

Civil War?
Charles Ingalls would have been a young man when the Civil War broke out, and the 5-year span between his marriage (1860) and the birth of his first child (1865) suggests an absence. Was he involved in the war? If not, what was he doing during that time? --Piledhigheranddeeper (talk) 20:46, 2 June 2016 (UTC)

He worked as a farmer, helping his parents farm their land and his brother-in-law Henry Quiner on his land, which adjoined Charles'. His younger brothers George and Lansford James did join the Union Army ("Little House in the Big Woods" mentions George returned "wild" from the war). His brother-in-law Joseph Quiner died from wounds at the Battle of Shiloh. 98.10.165.90 (talk) 19:16, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

More scholarly sources, less reliance on fictional books
This article relies in too many keys was on the fictional books about Ingalls life. There are scholarly sources that discuss some key elements that were left out of the book, such as him working as a hotel operator for a time. These should be included in the article.John Pack Lambert (talk) 18:06, 22 April 2024 (UTC)