what happened to Prince and Lady?

Last month my sister and I ordered a new set of "Little House" books on eBay. Like many of our books, our old copies had been literally read to bits, and we were getting sick of dropping pages and having to put them back in order.

It arrived a couple of weeks ago, but I was busy then, so I just finished rereading the books this week. Some thoughts...

- It must have really, really sucked to give up that house with the glass windows in Indian Territory. I wonder what happened to it?

- Was Mr. Edwards a real person? The whole walking forty miles in a blizzard part makes it seem like he must be made up, but wouldn't it be cool if he was real?

- "Farmer Boy" always makes me hungry. The mealtime descriptions are just delicious; I have to think really hard after reading them, to remember how plain the food really was back then.

- The two year gap in between "On the Banks of Plum Creek" and "By the Shores of Silver Lake" is still a little strange. I did some web surfing and discovered that someone has written a new book about that time; it talks about the Ingalls' living in Burr Oak (Iowa) for several years before returning to Plum Creek.

I've always liked all the books in the series except "The First Four Years", the last one. It's not written in the same style as all the other books, everything that happens is depressing, and it's somewhat disjointed. If the story had ended with "These Happy Golden Years", I could've imagined that Laura and Almanzo went on to be prosperous farmers, like the Wilders in New York. Instead, "The First Four Years" gives a glimpse of the poverty that they endured for most of their lives.

What a disappointment Almanzo's life must have been to him. In "Farmer Boy" he seemed like an especially precocious farmboy and horseman. In "The Long Winter" and "Little Town on the Prairie" he seemed courageous, dashing, and ahead of the game, with his superior team of horses and his own homestead claim. Given his promising start, it's especially disheartening to read about him ending up crippled and poor, losing his claim, and leaving De Smet for Missouri.

Speaking of horses, I've always wanted to know: What happened to the beautiful Morgan horses, Prince and Lady? At the end of "These Happy Golden Years" Almanzo uses them to drive Laura home after their wedding, and a pair of "brown horses" is mentioned a couple of times in the first few pages of "The First Four Years", but then they are never mentioned again. There's nothing anywhere on the web, either.