The Ingalls family had moved from Wisconsin to Kansas Indian Territory in 1869, where Charles built a claim shanty on Osage land.
Each morning Laura carried water from the creek while Mary watched baby Carrie, the prairie stretching empty and wide around them.
At night wolves howled beyond the door, their voices rising and falling like the prairie wind that rattled the unchinked logs.
Ma baked cornbread in the fireplace and sang softly, her voice steady even when the prairie seemed to swallow every sound.
One spring afternoon Pa returned from hunting with a deer across his shoulders, and the family ate fresh meat for the first time in weeks.
Neighbors were far away, yet when the Osage hunters passed, they sometimes left venison or a warning of approaching soldiers.
Laura learned to watch the sky for storms that could flood the creek and turn the wagon track into sticky black mud.
When the tallgrass burned, Pa plowed a firebreak and the family soaked blankets to beat back the flames that licked the cabin walls.
Winter brought deep snow that drifted over the door, so Charles dug a tunnel and the girls slid down its glittering sides.
By spring of 1870 the family learned the government would open the territory to settlers, and their claim might soon be lost.
Pa hitched the horses, packed the covered wagon, and the Ingalls left Kansas, crossing back into Missouri on a rutted trail.
They settled briefly near the Verdigris River, where Laura gathered hickory nuts and watched the water rise after sudden rains.
In 1871 they traveled north again, this time to Wisconsin, where Grandpa’s farm still stood among maples and the old log school.
Laura helped with chores and attended school in a one-room building where older boys chopped wood during recess.
Yet Charles longed for open land again, and in 1874 the family journeyed west to Minnesota, settling near Walnut Grove.
There Pa built another house, this time of boards, and Laura felt the wind whistle through cracks that needed fresh chinking.
Grasshoppers descended the next summer, eating every green leaf and leaving fields bare as winter before harvest could begin.
The family faced hunger, so Charles walked east to find work on the railroad while the women stayed to guard the claim.
Ma planted turnips in the ruined garden, and the girls carried water every day until tiny green shoots appeared above the dust.
When Pa returned with coins and flour, the family celebrated with pancakes and stories of the distant Mississippi.
Laura now eight, helped plant wheat again, watching the prairie turn gold before the first autumn frost whitened the stubble.
In 1876 another move carried them to Burr Oak, Iowa, where they helped run a hotel and Laura learned to serve strangers.
By winter they returned to Walnut Grove, and Charles took a job in a store while the girls attended school once more.
A hard winter followed, with blizzards that buried the town and trains that could not reach them for months.
The family nearly starved until neighbors shared potatoes and flour from hidden stores, proving how small settlements survived together.
In 1879 Charles accepted work on the Dakota railroad, and the family traveled by wagon to the banks of the Silver Lake.
There they built their last claim shanty, watching the empty prairie become a town of survey stakes and new frame houses.
Years later, when Laura wrote of these journeys, readers could trace the wagon ruts still visible across the turning earth.