A Trail of Wilder's Prairie Tales

In her Little House memoirs, Laura Ingalls Wilder so vividly limned the homesteads and Midwestern landscapes of her 19th century pioneering girlhood that millions of Americans know them as well as they do their own home and backyard. So engaging is Wilder's prose that after finishing all nine volumes, many can't bear to stop. Instead, they retrace Wilder's frontier by reading the series again and again, first to themselves and later to their children.

Now many are visiting Wilder territory in person. Claudia Brierre of Tulsa, Okla., is reading the books with her son Will, 6, and daughter Catharine, 8, and has begun taking them to the real-life settings. "I would rather give my children an appreciation of our country's history than take them to Disney World," she says. "These memories will stick with them the rest of their lives."

Visiting four of the main locales--there are many more--requires several days. If distances seem long to young ones, families can read the books aloud en route and marvel at the cheerful fortitude of the Ingalls girls, who uncomplainingly journeyed over rough ground in covered wagons with hard seats and no air-conditioning.

A logical place to start is Pepin, Wis., where Laura was born in 1867 in "the little house in the big woods," as she titled her first book. Though the Ingalls log cabin is gone, a faithful reconstruction now occupies the site. Upstairs is a large attic; downstairs are a bedroom, a pantry and a living room with a stone fireplace like the one where Laura and Mary warmed their toes on snowy nights as they listened to Pa's songs and stories. Tourists will also want to see the Pepin Historical Museum and its displays of local history. The town sits on Lake Pepin, where youngsters can follow Laura's footsteps, picking up pretty pebbles like the ones she collected in the pocket of her red calico dress so long ago.

When the Ingalls family decided to leave Pepin for the West, they hastened to cross the Mississippi while it was frozen. Today's travelers can cross by bridge in any season and, heading southwest, end up 100 miles later in Burr Oak, Iowa--forward in time to 1876, when Laura was nine and her family arrived there to help run the Masters Hotel. Laura's account of their sojourn in Burr Oak has never been published, and true fans will not want to miss it. The hotel is the only one of Laura's girlhood homes that remains on its original site. It has been restored and outfitted with furnishings authentic for the late 19th century, and it is easy to imagine little Laura scampering about the building and grounds with her sisters.

Some 240 miles northwest of Burr Oak lies tiny Walnut Grove, Minn., where the Ingallses moved in 1874 and where Laura set On the Banks of Plum Creek. The grass roof of the creekside dugout where the family spent their first year collapsed in the 1930s, but locals have identified the hollow in the creekbank where it once nestled. A child who stands quietly on the bridge nearby can hear the chatty burble of Plum Creek that delighted Laura a century ago--or perhaps glimpse a descendant of the toe-snatching crab or the blood-sucking leeches that terrified her. On display at the Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum on Eighth Street are tools once owned by Johnny Johnson, a neighbor friend of Laura's; a red-and-white quilt made by Laura and her daughter Rose; and memorabilia from the long-running television series based on the Little House books. Timely visitors will hear the tolling of the bell Pa chipped in to buy. It hangs now in the belfry of English Lutheran Church on Wiggens Street.

The final stop of the Ingallses' journey was De Smet, the town they helped establish in what is now South Dakota. Laura set the last five volumes of her memoirs there: By the Shores of Silver Lake, The Long Winter, Little Town on the Prairie, These Happy Golden Years and The First Four Years. The Ingallses moved to De Smet in 1879, when Laura was 12, and spent their first winter in a house near Silver Lake built for railroad surveyors. The house was later moved to the corner of Olivet Avenue and First Street, its original ambience preserved in the two-door cookstove, the red-checkered cloth on the table, the bureau handcrafted by Pa. Not far away stands the Ingalls Home, where Ma and Pa lived out their final years, furnished with family memorabilia and artifacts. Little House fans should take some time to stroll the streets, past the stores once frequented by the Ingallses. As Kimarie Sheppard, who visited De Smet with her eight-year-old son Eric, says, "It's neat to think that the houses all around were filled with neighbors who knew the Ingalls family."

Before heading back home, travelers should linger awhile at the De Smet Cemetery. Fittingly, considering the Ingallses' lifelong westward yearning, the final resting place of Ma, Pa, Mary, Carrie and Grace--and many of the family's friends--is on the western outskirts of the town.