Cindy Wilson is the author of The Beautiful Snow: The Ingalls Family, the Railroads, and the Hard Winter of 1880–81, which was awarded gold in the category of Midwest—Best Regional Non-Fiction for the 2021 Independent Publisher Book Awards (the IPPYs). It was also a 2020 finalist for the National Indie Excellence Awards. In the early research stage for The Beautiful Snow, Cindy read the diaries of surveyor Charles Wood Irish. She found them fascinating, knowing they held a fantastic story. The result is We Suffered Much, which won a National Indie Excellence Award in 2024 and a 2025 Independent Publisher Book Award (IPPY), her second.
Cindy is a sought-after speaker, having given talks to groups as large as 200 people, including the most-viewed talk of 2022 for the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library. An article about photography and art depicting the Hard Winter was published in South Dakota History Vol. 53 No. 4. She is listed among the credits of the PBS American Masters Laura Ingalls Wilder: Prairie to Page (Dec. 2020) for assisting the staff with the history of the Hard Winter and finding related locations for filming. Her research was cited in Pioneer Girl: The Revised Texts, as well as Rose Wilder Lane on Railroads and the Winter of 1880-1881, South Dakota History Vol. 51 No. 3.
She also enjoys traveling, especially with her daughter, who lives abroad (the inset photos hows them visiting Strasbourg France during October 2023 and at the 2024 Liverpool stop for Taylor Swift’s Era’s Tour, Show #100!). While not researching, she enjoys delving into architecture, creating art quilts, reading, hiking, biking, kayaking, and watching storms as a trained spotter for the National Weather Service.
For an example of art quilting, this .pdf shows the ribbon-winners for the most recent Cherrywood Fabrics Challenge exhibit. The fabric company created a packet of their fabric, and creators had to use only that fabric in a 20″x20″ piece on the given theme, which in this case—their 10th Challenge—was creatures of the deep sea, the Abyss. There are now only four, including Cindy, whose work has been blind juried into all ten challenges so far. Cindy’s entry for the next Challenge has been submitted.
After a four-decade-long career in high tech, website design, and communications, she supplements her writing projects with side-gigs to keep her skills fresh, doing document design and layout, producing newsletters or chorale programs for several organizations and is the grant administrator for another. She is also a board member for the Laura Ingalls Wilder Memorial Society in De Smet, South Dakota.
She recently completed a monograph for the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Stockman House, where she leads tours May through October. This small book is offered for sale within the gift shop, funds going to support the Stockman House. It can also be obtained online at ShopIowa.
While Cindy’s soul is most refreshed in South Dakota, she lives in southern Minnesota. And while she has now spent a decade immersed in the Hard Winter of 1880–81, her ideal day is actually eighty degrees with a smidge of humidity. Her response to the pandemic was to learn to play the cello. In summer 2025, she took up watercolor painting because why not! A few recent samples are below.
