Little House on the Prairie: Pepin to Mansfield

The first book begins in a log house in the Big Woods, where Laura gathers wood chips, helps Ma and Pa preserve meat, and gets a rag doll named Charlotte when her cousins come for Christmas. Wilder drew it from her own childhood on this Pepin County farm, seven miles northwest of Pepin, where she was born in 1867. A replica of the house described in Little House in the Big Woods stands on the spot, unfurnished, with a fireplace, two bedrooms and a loft. It closes once the snow gets deep.

Visitor guidance: The wayside is a rest area on County Highway CC, seven miles northwest of Pepin, Wisconsin.

Pa builds the one-room log house in Indian Territory, and the family farms land it has no legal right to occupy. Malaria lays them all low, Osage people are a common sight, and Carrie is born in August 1870. Then word comes that U.S. soldiers will remove the white settlers, and Pa decides to move on. The museum stands on the old claim in Montgomery County, with a replica of the cabin, the Sunnyside schoolhouse and the post office from Wayside moved to the grounds. It opened in 1977.

Visitor guidance: The museum is southwest of Independence, Kansas, and open seasonally.

The Ingalls leave Kansas by covered wagon and settle beside Plum Creek, where Pa trades the horses Pet and Patty for a dugout and stable. Laura and Mary meet Nellie Oleson, the storekeeper's daughter, go to school for the first time, and watch the locust plague destroy the wheat in 1874. A four-day blizzard delays Pa's homecoming. The dugout stood about 1.5 miles north of Walnut Grove; the town's Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum tells the story, though the television series was filmed in California.

Location precision: The 1874 dugout stood about 1.5 miles north of Walnut Grove; the pin marks the town's Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum, which interprets the site.

Visitor guidance: The museum is in Walnut Grove; the dugout site lies about 1.5 miles north of town.

By the Shores of Silver Lake opens as the family leaves Plum Creek for Dakota Territory, where the surveyors ask them to keep watch over their equipment and stay in their house for the winter. Pa files a homestead claim south of De Smet in the spring of 1880; the next winter, the Hard Winter, becomes The Long Winter. Laura teaches school to help send blind Mary to college, and Almanzo Wilder, a bachelor homesteader, courts her. The 160-acre homestead southeast of town is open to visitors.

Visitor guidance: The homesite is southeast of De Smet and open to visitors; the Surveyors' House is in town.

The last stop is not a book setting but the place the books were made. Laura and Almanzo bought 40 acres here in 1894, and she lived at Rocky Ridge until her death in 1957. At 65 she wrote the first four Little House books in the Rock House, the cottage her daughter Rose built in 1928. The farmhouse and Rock House are open for tours, and Mansfield still holds a yearly festival that turns the clock back to the late 19th century.

Visitor guidance: Rocky Ridge Farm is at 3060 Highway A in Mansfield; the house and Rock House are open for tours.