A Little Gray House Made of Logs
Charles and Caroline Ingalls live in the Big Woods
of Wisconsin with daughters Mary, Laura, and baby
Carrie. The family gets ready for winter
through hunting, harvesting, preserving and
storing of provisions. Everything from butchering
to bullet-making is seen through five-year-old
Laura's eyes.
Pioneering isn't only about hard work. Laura and Mary play with their dolls in the spacious attic. Ma makes paper dolls for them, they bake cookies, and they use Ma's thimble to make patterns in the frost on the window. The best time of all is at night, when Pa comes home from hunting or trapping and he plays games with the girls or settles them on his knees before the fire and tells them stories - stories about when he was a little boy or even when his own father was young. Then Pa plays the fiddle and sings.
Family Visitors
Even though the Ingalls family seems isolated, there are plenty of family members close enough to visit. Uncle Peter's family comes for Christmas, and the Ingalls family shares harvest-time with Uncle Henry's family. Best of all is the sugaring-off in Grandpa and Grandma's big log house deep in the Big Woods, with music and dancing and plenty of good food.
A Visit to Town
In the spring, Laura sees the town of Pepin for the first time. She sees more houses than she can count, and a big store full of interesting things to look at, where Ma and Pa buy tea and sugar and other things they can't grow or hunt for in the Big Woods. Laura and Mary collect pebbles along the shore of Lake Pepin, then the Ingalls family returns to the little log cabin, where the weather is again getting colder and it's time to prepare for another cosy winter.
Little House in the Big Woods was published in
1932. There are several surviving portions of
drafts of this manuscript, owned by the Laura
Ingalls Wilder / Rose Wilder Lane Home and Museum
in Mansfield, Missouri. A copy of this manuscript
is on microfilm at both the Herbert Hoover
Presidential Library in West Branch, Iowa, and at
Western Historical Manuscripts at the University
of Missouri at Columbia.
