The television version came from Michael Landon himself, who wrote and directed “The Lord Is My Shepherd.” It first aired on NBC on December 18, 1974, as a two-hour episode, and in reruns it plays as two parts. Caroline gives birth to a boy, Reverend Alden baptizes him Charles Frederick Ingalls, and Pa is so proud of his son that Laura starts to feel she has lost her place with him.
That jealousy is the heart of the story. When the baby falls ill, Laura cannot bring herself to pray for him, and when he dies she is sure it is her fault. Reverend Alden tells her to draw closer to God, so she takes him literally. She packs up and climbs a mountain to ask God to take her instead and send her brother back. There she meets a kindly stranger named Jonathan, played by Ernest Borgnine, while Pa and Mr. Edwards, played by Victor French, search the hills for her.
Landon had found something true about grief in a child, the private bargain a little girl makes when she thinks a bad thought caused a bad thing. What he could not have known was how hard the episode would be for his young co-star to watch years later.
Why Melissa Gilbert Still Calls It Her Favorite
Melissa Gilbert, now 62, has named “The Lord Is My Shepherd” her favorite episode more than once. “It is the clearest portrayal of my personal relationship with Michael,” she told USA Today in 2024, as reported by TVLine. “The chemistry is palpable. It’s all on screen.”
In her 2014 book My Prairie Cookbook, as quoted by Showbiz Cheat Sheet, she called it “one of the stronger, if not the strongest, episodes we ever did,” and said the reunion of Pa and Laura on Jonathan’s mountain was the perfect picture of what she and Landon shared off camera. “The tears were mutual and real,” she wrote. Then came the confession that surprises fans: “This is the one I just can’t bring myself to watch.”
Landon died in 1991, which explains a good deal of that. The episode is a record of a father and daughter on screen who loved each other just as much once the cameras stopped. And the baby whose death set it all in motion had a real story of his own.
Who Was The Real Freddie Ingalls?
The real Ingalls family came to Walnut Grove in 1874 and lived first in a dugout on the banks of Plum Creek. Freddie was born there on November 1, 1875, the fourth child of Charles and Caroline and their only son. His birth and death dates appear in the records of both his mother and his famous sister, and the family named him for his father. Mary was ten, Laura was eight and Carrie had just turned five.
The family did not stay. In the summer of 1876 they headed for Burr Oak, Iowa, where Pa had agreed to help run a hotel. On the way they stopped at the farm of Pa’s brother Peter and his wife Eliza near South Troy, Minnesota. That was where the baby grew sick. Freddie died there on August 27, 1876, and the cause has never been known for certain.
The show changed the setting and squeezed the timeline. On television the baby lives only a short while in Walnut Grove. In life he had nearly ten months with his family, long enough for his sisters to know him, and he died far from home at a relative’s farm.
Why Did Laura Ingalls Wilder Leave Him Out Of Her Books?
Readers of On the Banks of Plum Creek will remember the grasshoppers, the blizzard and Nellie Oleson, but there is no baby brother in it. The book goes straight from Plum Creek to the family’s move west in By the Shores of Silver Lake, and the Burr Oak months in between, Freddie’s death among them, are left out. “How could she have failed to mention her brother, Freddie, who had lived only nine months?” Lisa Blumberg asked in American Heritage in 1997.
Laura did write it down once. Her first draft of her life story, the manuscript she called Pioneer Girl, was written for grown-ups around 1930 and stayed unpublished until the South Dakota Historical Society Press released an annotated edition in 2014, edited by Pamela Smith Hill. In it she remembers that “Little Brother was not well,” and she says that one day “he straightened out his little body and was dead.” The line is quoted in the Christianity Today review of the book and in the State Historical Society of Missouri’s Wilder papers.
She never explained why she kept it out of the children’s books, and anyone who claims to know is guessing. The Burr Oak chapter of the family’s life was a hard one, and Wilder chose to skip it whole rather than tell it in pieces. Grace, the youngest Ingalls girl, was born in Burr Oak in 1877, so in the novels she simply appears as the baby of the family, and the brother who came before her is never mentioned.
How Did His Death Change The Ingalls Family?
Freddie may have vanished from the books, but he never left his mother’s mind. Wilder historian William Anderson wrote in his 1989 booklet Laura Ingalls Wilder: The Iowa Story that “nearly forty years after Freddie’s death, Ma mourned him,” and that she would tell relatives how different everything would have been “if Freddie had lived.”
That is the part the television episode got right, even with the dates rearranged. Karen Grassle, 84, played a mother who buries her only son and keeps going for the sake of her girls, and the real Caroline Ingalls did the same thing on the road to Iowa. If the family’s story moved you, the show’s handling of why Mary Ingalls really went blind follows the same pattern, a real family tragedy reshaped for the screen.
Pa had four daughters who grew up and no son to follow him into the fields. Somewhere near South Troy lies the little boy who would have been that son. His sister gave him one sentence about the day he straightened out his little body, and his mother kept him with her for forty years.
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