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Laura's Little House (er, Cave) on the Prairie After visiting Henry's barn and saying goodbye to Mike and Roger, I left Windom, Minnesota on Friday afternoon and camped nearby at Shetek Lake State Park. A powerful thunderstorm rolled in after dinner, so I hopped in the back of my pickup and closed everything up tight. The storm was so intense that I couldn't look out the window because the lightning flashed continually for 40 to 50 seconds at a time and was, literally, too painful to watch. It was quite an amazing storm, but fortunately there wasn't much hail which, in the Midwest, can be a big problem judging from all the pock-marked cars that I see in parking lots here. Yep, hail dent repair apparently is big business in the Midwest.
The weather was cloudy and cool on Saturday morning as I drove into the small village of Walnut Grove, Minnesota. If you watched television in the 1970s, the name "Walnut Grove" might ring a bell because it was the setting for the television series, "Little House on the Prairie," which was based loosely on the childhood of author Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867 - 1957). I've never read Laura's series of books but I've always been fascinated with the pioneering experience, long before I knew that my ancestors were themselves pioneers – and in this same part of Minnesota, as it turns out. I dropped by the Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum in Walnut Grove and soon learned, though, that the television series was almost entirely fictional. It's a little confusing but I'll try to clear it up.
The real Laura Ingalls (a.k.a. "Half-pint") was born in rural Wisconsin, near Minnesota. Her parents, Charles and Caroline, moved the family around the Midwest throughout the 1870s and 1880s because Charles, it seems, had a bad case of itchy feet, plus he couldn't hold down a job for one reason or another (though he could play a mean fiddle, just like in the television series). Among their many moves around the Midwest, the Ingalls lived for a while in a sod "dugout" – a cave, really – on Plum Creek, near the town of Walnut Grove, Minnesota.
In 1880, Charles got a job for a railroad company farther west, on the barren plains of eastern South Dakota in what is today the town of De Smet, and he moved his family there. Laura, who was 13 when she moved to De Smet, finished high school there and became a school teacher, married a local farmer named Almanzo Wilder a few years later, then moved with him to Missouri.
When Laura was in her 50s, she began writing a series of books about her childhood adventures in the various places that she had lived. She based her book, On the Banks of Plum Creek on her experiences of living in the sod dugout near Walnut Grove and based another book, called Little House on the Prairie, on her experiences of living in a little house (and on the prairie, no less) in Independence, Kansas. She based several other books, including "The Long Winter" and "On the Shores of Silver Lake," on her later experiences in De Smet, South Dakota when she was a teenager.
Above left: The Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum in Walnut Grove, Minnesota. There are also museums in the numerous other towns where she lived, including De Smet, South Dakota, which I visited later that day. Above right: This sign sits atop of Laura's former sod dugout on the banks of Plum Creek, near Walnut Grove. There were very few trees in the upper Midwest back then, so most families either built sod houses or dug a cave into the side of a hill, like the Ingalls did here.
Above left: Carrie, Mary, and Laura Ingalls in the 1870s, around the time they lived in Walnut Grove. Above center: A sketch of the Ingalls' dugout near Plum Creek with a "window" that was made of oiled paper. There's nothing left of the dugout now except a sunken depression. How would you like to spend a snowy winter living here? Above right: After leaving Walnut Grove, the Ingalls headed west to De Smet, South Dakota. I did too, while traveling along the Laura Ingalls Wilder highway. Laura's Long Winter In the 1970s, NBC created a television series based on Laura Ingalls Wilder's childhood experiences, although the producers took some liberties with her stories. It's hard to film inside a dirt cave, so they gave the family a wooden house, called the town "Walnut Grove" (which has a better ring than "De Smet"), and called the series "Little House on the Prairie," though it wasn't set anywhere near Independence, Kansas, where she had based that book on. This was an amalgam of her experiences in Kansas, Minnesota, and South Dakota, of course, and is sort of like making a Mr. Potato Head while putting all the pieces in the wrong places. But Laura was dead by then and no one raised a fuss.
I hope that's not too confusing but I wanted to set the record straight, since the T.V. producers twisted things all around with Laura. And don't get me started on what they did to her little dog. To their credit, though, the producers did use actresses who looked remarkably like Laura and her sister, Mary.
By the way, the Ingalls family lived in Walnut Grove in 1879, which was the same year that my great-great-grandfather, Henry Reinhard, had moved to this area from points east. In fact, his son Henry Jr. (my great-grandfather) was the same age as Laura, so they may have known each other and may have even gone to the same school. Heck, young Henry may have even dunked poor Laura's pigtails in his inkwell. I also learned that the real Nellie Oleson moved from Walnut Grove to Tillamook, Oregon, where I'm sure she pestered her neighbors before moving to Portland, where she died in 1949. I'll be sure to look up Nellie's gravestone when I get back there.
As it turned out, this would be my "Laura Ingalls Wilder" day, because after visiting the museum in Walnut Grove, Minnesota and seeing where the Ingalls lived on the banks of Plum Creek, I drove 100 miles west to visit the sleepy town of De Smet, South Dakota, where the Ingalls had moved in 1880. De Smet was where Laura had based her book, "The Long Winter," among other works. Pa Ingalls planted cottonwood trees on their homestead here and these very same cottonwoods are, amazingly enough, still standing. Instead of paying $15 for a Laura Ingalls t-shirt in the nearby Visitor Center, I just picked up a cottonwood twig and put it in my truck which, I thought, made a much better souvenir.
Above left: After "The Long Winter" of 1880-81, Pa Ingalls built this house for his family in De Smet. Above right: Laura lived a few blocks from this bar in De Smet, but I don't think she ever downed a cold one here.
Above left: The introduction to the NBC series, Little House on the Prairie. Above center: Here's Ma and Pa Ingalls, also known as Michael Landon and Karen Grassle. I doubt if my great-great-grandparents looked this cheerful (or clean) after bumping their way across southern Minnesota in a covered wagon back in 1879. Above right: The three Ingalls girls, led by Half-pint. My great-grandfather, Henry Reinhard Jr., moved to the Walnut Grove area in 1879, the same year as the Ingalls and was Laura's age, so they may have known each other.
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