Edwin Hyde "Robert" Alden was an American Congregational minister. He was one of the many real people upon whom Laura Ingalls Wilder based a character in the Little House on the Prairie series of books and the NBC television series of the same name.

By the Shores of Silver Lake is an autobiographical children's novel written by Laura Ingalls Wilder and published in 1939, the fifth of nine books in her Little House series. It spans just over one year, beginning when she is 12 years old and her family moves from Plum Creek, Minnesota to what will become De Smet, South Dakota.