She urged Almanzo to read Lane’s articles, emphasizing “that all the stories in them, although incidents, are true, and actually happened.”57 Yet she acknowledged in the same breath that the real “Ed” was not a detective. Her interpretation demonstrates how elastic the concept of truth and “true stories” was at the time, even in a medium designed to publish factual material. In years to come, she and Lane would cling fast to this notion of “truth,” which reflected not objective reality but something closer to felt experience.
