Laura Ingalls Wilder was the author of the famous Little House on the Prairie series of books which were televised in the 1970s. She was born in 1867 in Wisconsin. This period, soon after the Civil War was a period when the frontier was opened up. People moved out west, mainly to take up offers of free land, and build communities in the land that was being cleared of its American Indians and turned over to farming and ranching. Her parents were pioneers who led a wandering life.. Laura was the second child, and grew up leading a hardscrabble existence, moving from place to place, working hard and never quite rising to prosperity.
Her father had a wanderlust and also the severe weather conditions of the frontier often made for hardship, with crops being destroyed by blizzards, drought and so on. They moved to the Indian lands in Kansas a few years after Laura's birth but only stayed a short while. They found that the farm they had settled in was on an Indian reservation so they went back to Wisconsin. Charles Ingalls her father took odd jobs as well as farming.. but farming was precarious due to frequent crop failure. The family moved around Minnesota, Iowa and Dakota before settling in a new town called De Smet in 1879 where the were to remain for the rest of their lives. However life was still hard and Laura was expected to contribute to the family income as soon as she could. She went to school in small one room schoolhouses and as she was an intelligent girl, she enjoyed learning and it gave her the option of becoming a teacher. It was almost the only career for a respectable young woman. She also worked as a dressmaker in her teens and then started to teach high school.
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