Little House on the Prairie

Historical Goof: Charles tells Almanzo that they will be making their delivery to northern Arizona. Arizona didn't become a state until 1912, when the real-life Laura Ingalls was 45 years old!

Nancy is seen reading quite a provocative book in this episode. Where did she get such reading material? It's hard to believe that mercantile would have stocked it, as Harriet was such a prude about material as "racy" as the undergarments catalog pages and Doc Baker's anatomy books.

At the very end of the episode, Almanzo comes home and leaves his team of horses and wagon standing in the pouring rain and a thunderstorm. Because he follows Laura into the house after remarking how hungry he is, and she's beginning to tell the tale of what happened while he was gone, you get the impression he's going to be in the house for some time. A farmer would never leave his livestock and wagon standing in the drenching rains and especially such severe lightening, as both could be damaged or destroyed.

Throughout the episode, when she comes home from teaching all day, Laura is seen watering her plants with the sun directly overhead. Not only would she have been teaching school at this time, but as a farmer's daughter and former teacher of agriculture, she should have known that the best time to water crops is in the early morning hours or in the evening. The water would have been less likely to evaporate at those times, when the sun wasn't so fierce.

The planting of the Wilder's orchard in this episode mirrors a real-life event chronicled in Laura Ingalls Wilder's final book, The First Four Years. During the first four years of their marriage, the Wilders lived mostly in Mansfield, Missouri, where they did indeed plant a large apple orchard. Just like in this episode, the Wilders experienced great difficulty in getting the trees to take root and thrive. In fact, their real-life orchard did not produce a crop until the trees were seven years old.

Early in the episode, Willie mentions to Laura that he'd like to go out and do something big, but he thinks he'll probably wind up "running the mercantile and wearing an apron instead of a six gun." Ironically, when Willie met his future wife in Season 9, he genuinely wanted to stay in Walnut Grove and run the family business, and he was willing to completely sacrifice college for that. Apparently, his priorities changed quite a bit in one year.

Pregnant women were not permitted to teach school in this time period. In fact, Laura's books imply that married women didn't teach at all.