[3][4][5][6] His siblings included Laura Ann (1844–1899), Royal Gould (1847–1925), Eliza Jane (1850–1930), Alice Maria (1853–1892), and Perley Day Wilder (1869–1934).

[7] As part of her Little House series of semi-autobiographical novels, Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote a book titled Farmer Boy about Wilder's childhood in upstate New York; he would subsequently become a recurring character in the later Little House books in which his wife wrote about their courtship and subsequent marriage, in The Long Winter, Little Town on the Prairie, These Happy Golden Years, and The First Four Years, respectively.

Wilder settled on his homestead with the intent of planting acres of seed wheat which he had cultivated the previous summer on rented shares in Marshall, Minnesota.

Along with Ed "Cap" Garland, Wilder risked his life to save the citizens of De Smet from starvation during the long, hard winter of 1880–81.

In between storms of a winter of unusually frequent and severe blizzards, which prevented trains from bringing food and supplies to the town, they went 12 miles (19 km) into the open prairie in search of wheat that a farmer was said to have harvested somewhere to the southwest of De Smet.

Hauling the life-saving grain on sleds that continually broke through the snow into slough grass, they just made it back to De Smet before another four-day blizzard hit the area.

Wilder would drive Ingalls back and forth between De Smet and a new settlement 12 miles (19 km) outside town, where she was teaching school and boarding.

His inability to perform the hard physical labor associated with wheat farming in South Dakota, combined with a lengthy drought in the late 1880s and early 1890s, further contributed to the Wilders' downward spiral into insolvency.

According to Rose Wilder Lane, "It took seven successive years of complete crop failure, with work, weather and sickness that wrecked his health permanently, and interest rates of 36 percent on money borrowed to buy food, to dislodge us from that land.

Over the span of 20 years, Wilder built his wife what she later referred to as her dream house: a unique 10-room home in which he custom-built kitchen cabinets to accommodate her small, five-foot (1.52 m) frame.

Almanzo Wilder lived out the rest of his life on his farm, and both he and his wife were active in various community and church pursuits during their time in Missouri.

Eventually their efforts at Rocky Ridge during the 1930s and 1940s, along with the book royalties finally provided a secure enough income to allow them to attain a financial stability they had not known earlier in their marriage.

When they were first married, Wilder's wife had helped contribute to their income by taking in occasional boarders, writing columns for a rural newspaper, and serving as Treasurer/Loan Officer for a Farm Loan Association.

When their daughter moved permanently to Connecticut around 1937, the Wilders quickly returned to their beloved farm house, later selling off the eastern land with the stone cottage.

From the accounts left by his wife and daughter, Almanzo Wilder appears to have been a quiet, stoic man, representative of the time and culture in which he lived.

[13] Laura Ingalls Wilder published in 1933 the novel Farmer Boy, a mostly fictional account based on one year from Almanzo's childhood.

[15] Operated and sustained by the Almanzo & Laura Ingalls Wilder Association, the homestead is an interactive educational center, museum, and working farm.