Once upon a time, many years ago, Laura Ingalls Wilder recorded the memories of her early life, from age two when she and her family settled in Indian Territory, through her marriage at age eighteen to Almanzo Wilder, in 1885. She wrote in soft pencil on lined school tablets, and by the time she finished writing, Mrs. Wilder had filled almost four hundred pages with what would be edited and expanded over the next two decades into the award winning "Little House"® series of books.

The original manuscript was probably intended to be read by only one other person, Wilder's daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, an internationally acclaimed author. Rose encouraged and helped her mother re-work the stories about Laura Ingalls' early years near Pepin, Wisconsin, into what became Little House in the Big Woods, published in 1932. The rest is history.