scramble on up

Going back from the swimming hole they first climbed up a low bank, then crossed a wide place of almost level land before they came to the higher bank and the prairie. It the center of the flat, low land was what Pa called a table-land of high ground. He said there was a good half acre of ground on the flat top of it.

The tableland was almost perfectly round and looked like an island rising out of the sea of tall grass and rushes. "Must have been made by water washing around it," Pa said. He helped Laura and Mary climb to the top where they ran a little way in the green grass that grew all over it. - On the Banks of Plum Creek manuscript

Pretty much everybody calls the area east of the "high bank" north of the Plum Creek preemption dugout site the tableland. A sign points you in that direction, and it's easily photographed from the dugout site. I don't think that's correct.

There are a couple of existing drawings by Laura Ingalls Wilder (one is shown here), who remembered - and yes, I realize that she's been wrong before - that the tableland was a half acre in size and located south of the swimming hole, which was north of the dugout site. For water to have "flowed around it," the tableland had to have been positioned so that there was a low area to the east of it. In Chapter 14, "Spring Freshet," Wilder writes: The tableland was a round island. All around it water flowed smoothly, coming out of a wide, humping river and running back into it. Where the swimming-pool had been, the tall willows were short willows standing in a lake.

A lot can change in 100+ years, including the course of a creek. One of the biggest changes at some point was that irrigation ditches were dug running due west from the creek, drawing water from what was most likely the swimming hole and thicket of willows. Today, that area is all in trees, but all topo maps for decades clearly have shown two things: a small rise of about a half acre in size near a low marshy area bounded by the creek. The large flat triangular field to the north of the dugout site? Not the tableland.
- posted by pioneergirl at 11:51 PM