Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote the nine Little House books with Little House in the Big Woods as the first in the series. Born on Thursday 7 February 1867 in the "Big Woods" of Wisconsin near the frontier town of Pepin during a freezing cold winter, Laura Elizabeth Ingalls was the second daughter and child of Charles Philip Ingalls and Caroline Lake Quiner Ingalls. Charles supported his family by farming, hunting, and trapping. He was also a skilled carpenter who always provided his family with shelter. Caroline was a wife, mother, and former schoolteacher who instilled the importance of reading and education in her children. Laura was also the first younger sister to two-year-old Mary Amelia Ingalls. Charles always called his second daughter Half-Pint. Laura, whose first memory was of her father playing his fiddle and telling stories in that little log cabin in the woods, always called her parents Ma and Pa. As a member of a pioneer family, however, Laura did not call the Big Woods home for long. When Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act of 1862, Americans gained the opportunity to claim land for free in the West belonging to the American government by building a house and creating a farm on the homestead. Charles Ingalls, who lived part of his childhood on the Illinois prairie outside of Chicago, yearned to leave the forest against which he fought a constant battle for farmland and move his family back to the open prairie of rich black soil. Caroline agreed to leave the little house in the big woods, and the Ingalls family, including three-year-old Mary and one-year-old Laura, packed up a covered wagon and traveled to Rutland Township in Montgomery County in Kansas. The third Ingalls daughter, Caroline Celestia "Carrie" Ingalls, was born in the log house Charles built near Walnut Creek. Laura later wrote about the experience in Little House on the Prairie, although she changed the chronology for the series. The Ingalls family, however, did not realize Charles had established their new farm on a Native American reservation called the Osage Diminished Reserve. Once the Native Americans began debating war against the homesteaders for invading the territory, Charles decided to move his family back to the Big Woods in Wisconsin. Along with her parents and sisters, four-year-old Laura traveled back in a covered wagon to the little house in Wisconsin. Her earliest memories were of living for a second time in the log cabin in the Wisconsin woods with her parents and older sister, which she eventually wrote about in Little House in the Big Woods. Laura remembered playing with her older sister and cousins as well as helping her mother with the household chores. But, Charles continued to long for the openness of the prairie, and the Ingalls family once again packed up their belongings and headed west. Laura and her family lived on the banks of Plum Creek in Minnesota, the town of Walnut Grove in Minnesota, and the town of Burr Oak in Iowa before finally settling in the newly established town of De Smet in South Dakota when Laura was thirteen. During the long journey to South Dakota, the Ingalls family buried nine-month-old baby brother Charles Frederick "Freddie" Ingalls and then welcomed Grace Pearl Ingalls as the fourth Ingalls sister. Charles built a farm outside of De Smet, and the whole Ingalls family worked hard to make their new house a home. Then, when she was fifteen-years-old, Laura met the man who became the second important man next to her father in her life. Almanzo Wilder offered to bring Laura home to her family on the weekends in his sleigh from her first teaching job at the Bouchie School. After courting for two years, Laura and Almanzo were married and began their life as husband and wife on their own homestead outside of De Smet on 25 August 1885. The Wilder family suffered many misfortunes including crop failure, debilitating illness, and economic hardship during the first few years on the little farm. although daughter Rose Wilder Lane survived to adulthood to become a journalist, travel writer, novelist, and political theorist, a second unnamed child, a son, died shortly after birth and was buried in an unmarked grave in the De Smet cemetery. Laura never completely recovered from the loss. The family eventually moved to Missouri to escape the hardships of the prairie and settled on Rocky Ridge farm outside of Mansfield. During a trip to San Francisco in 1915 to visit the now adult Rose, Laura wrote letters to Almanzo and eventually published some stories about a fair she attended in California, which began her career as a columnist in the Missouri Ruralist. Years later, Laura decided to write down and preserve for her daughter some of the stories Charles Ingalls told during her childhood as a pioneer girl. although publishers initially rejected the first draft, Rose helped her mother revise and resubmit the story. Little House in the Big Woods was published by Harper & Brothers in 1932. Laura continued to write the subsequent books in the Little House series until her death on Sunday 10 February 1957 at the age of ninety. As Laura later said of her writing, her experiences on the prairie were "stories that had to be told" and her memories of pioneer life "were altogether too good to be lost."

Laura Ingalls Wilder Ma Carrie Laura Pa Grace Mary Almanzo Wilder Rose Wilder Lane Laura Ingalls Wilder

Anderson, William. Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Biography. Harper Collins Publishers: New York: 1992.

Giff, Patricia Reilly. Laura Ingalls Wilder: Growing Up in the Little House. Puffin Books: New York, 1987.

"Laura Ingalls Wilder: De Smet, South Dakota Street Map, Wilder Claim." The Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum. National Archives and Records Administration. 19 Sep. 2007. <http://hoover.archives.gov/LIW/DeSmet/desmet_wilderclaim.html>

"Laura Ingalls Wilder: Pioneering Journeys of the Ingalls Family, De Smet, South Dakota." The Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum. National Archives and Records Administration. 19 Sep. 2007. <http://hoover.archives.gov/LIW/pioneering/pioneering_desmet.html>

"Laura Ingalls Wilder: Pioneering Journeys of the Ingalls Family, Mansfield, Missouri." The Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum. National Archives and Records Administration. 19 Sep. 2007. <http://hoover.archives.gov/LIW/pioneering/pioneering_mansfield.html>

"Rose Wilder Lane." Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. 4 Sep. 2007. Wikimedia Foundation. 18 Sep. 2007. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rose_Wilder_Lane>

Swanke, Sharon. "Biographical Sketch." Historical Overview of Laura Ingalls Wilder's "Little House in the Big Woods". 2004. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. 2 Sep. 2007. <https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/sswanke2/www/bio.html>