I grew up on Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books. My sister Lisa and I borrowed one from the neighbor down the street and we were instantly hooked. There were eight books in the series. We begged and borrowed. We waited weeks for our turn to read the single copy in the local library. We pooled our allowance and baby-sitting money and purchased one. Mostly we borrowed from the neighbor, which meant they had to be returned. Perhaps this explains why I have held tightly to every book I have ever owned.
I digress. This post isn’t about me. It is about a pioneering prairie girl, Laura Ingalls Wilder, who lived on the western frontier from the mid-1800’s to the mid-1900s. Laura was born in 1867 near Pepin, Wisconsin in The Little House in the Big Woods. Laura's family moved to Kansas, back to Wisconsin, then to Minnesota, then to Iowa, back to Minnesota, and finally to De Smet, South Dakota. Laura lived in many little houses, including The Little House on the Prairie, the Surveyors House, Ma’s Shanty House on the Homestead, and the house Pa built in the city. Laura eventually grew up, married, and raised a daughter, Rose, who became a newspaper journalist. Rose persuaded her mother to write about her childhood, and in 1932 at the age of 65, Laura published her first book, Little House in the Big Woods, which would become the first book in the series . The ten-year-old version of me was oblivious to these details when I was devouring the books. I simply loved the story of the raw, untamed world being explored by a fiercely determined family searching for a better life, as told by a girl who didn’t seem much different from me.
Today, we visited some of the homes and places where Laura had lived and wrote about. Ron was skeptical. He was familiar with the Little House story, but he had never read the books. Ron had watched the Little House on the Prairie TV series in order to see Michael Landon (who played Pa) who Ron remembered as Little Joe in the TV series Bonanza (1959-1973). Bonanza was Ron’s Little House. As we left Interstate 90 to spend the day on the back roads of South Dakota and Minnesota, Ron asked if there would at least be one of those life-size wooden cut outs of the characters that we could stick our faces in for a photo. I asked Ron to behave.
We had a picnic in the tall prairie grass on the homestead in De Smet, South Dakota. Afterward, Ron inspected the wagon wheels
while I see-sawed in the school yard, played the piano in the church, and curled up with a kitten in the barn. In the distance, a team of horses pulled a wagon. The homestead had changed hands over the years, but it was eventually purchased for preservation and opened to the public. A few of the Ingall’s family’s original homes, and reconstructions of others, have been placed around the property, and visitors are invited to explore, contemplate, and connect. There are even covered wagons that can be rented for overnight stays.
From De Smet, South Dakota, we continued east on US 14 for a little over a hundred miles to Walnut Grove, Minnesota. Laura had lived in Walnut Grove at different times in her childhood, and it is where the TV series, The Little House on the Prairie is set.
The goal was to arrive by 4:00 so that we could spend an hour in the museum, the only museum we attempted to visit on the entire trip. But I didn’t factor in the time change from the Central to Eastern Time Zone, and we arrived just after closing. As luck would have it, and fulfilling Ron’s snarky prediction, there were life-size wooden cut outs of Laura and her family.
Car Talk
Distance: 388 miles
Driving Time: 6 hours, 38 minutes
Mileage: 29.0 mpg
Average Speed: 58 mph
Trip Total: 8,529.1
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