Laura Ingalls Wilder · 1935 · overland

Laura Ingalls Wilder's beloved Little House books, drawn from her real pioneer childhood. This route follows the Ingalls family's covered-wagon journey across the frontier as the series tells it: from the Big Woods of Wisconsin to the Kansas prairie, north to Plum Creek in Minnesota, and on to De Smet in Dakota Territory, through prairie fires, grasshopper plagues and the famous Long Winter, ever in search of new land and a place to call home.

1. 1
   Pepin

   The series opens in the Big Woods of Wisconsin, near Pepin, where young Laura Ingalls lives with Pa, Ma, Mary and baby Carrie in a snug log cabin among the trees, in a world of bears and deer, maple sugaring and long snowbound winters. But Pa feels the woods growing too crowded with settlers, and his heart is set on the open country to the west.

2. 2
   Independence

   Loading everything into the covered wagon, the family crosses the frozen Mississippi and travels down through Missouri and out onto the high open grassland of Indian Territory, near Independence, Kansas. Pa builds a little house on the prairie, where they befriend their neighbour Mr. Edwards, dig a well, and weather prairie fire, fever and a long night ringed by wolves, until word comes that settlers must leave the Osage lands.

3. 3
   Walnut Grove

   The wagon rolls north again to Minnesota, where the family settles on the banks of Plum Creek near Walnut Grove, living at first in a dugout cut into the creek bank. Pa raises a fine house and a tall wheat crop on credit, only for it to be devoured by a vast glittering plague of grasshoppers, and the family learns once more the hard uncertainty of a homesteader's life.

4. 4
   De Smet

   Drawn west by the coming railroad, the family makes its last great move to Dakota Territory, the girls taking their very first train ride to the camp by Silver Lake. They claim a homestead by the new town of De Smet, endure the brutal Long Winter when the blizzards bury the rails and the town nearly starves, and there at last put down roots, where Laura grows up, teaches school, and marries Almanzo Wilder.