Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote the Little House On The Prairie as a faithful account of her pioneer childhood in Indian Territory in the 1870’s.
It is her second book in a series of nine and sees her family leaving the Big Woods of Wisconsin for the great wide open spaces of the prairies of Dakota. Among the first white settlers in the region, the family find themselves beset by Indians on the warpath to save their land and way of life. In one story, Laura recounts the majesty of an Indian chief who rides swiftly through the night on his white horse to convince his fellow Indians to spare the lives of the settlers.
The book is a fascinating picture of a lifestyle now long since gone, where hardship and insecurity were commonplace and yet the community was forged with deep bonds to family, one another and to nature.
Laura’s trademark is her warm and inclusive style. In her capable hands even descriptions of common place activities are brought to magical life giving us an intense and vivid picture of what life really was like. While her books are valuable historical documents, they are truly much more than that. Her words draw you into a world of warm, spiritual love, enveloping you in her beautiful, kind and so very human vision of life. Laura invites us to share her fears at the natural calamities and overwhelming disasters which her family endured.
She shows us her great reverence for the Indian culture, giving us an eye witness window into its magnificence at the dawn of white man’s arrival in America. She takes us through the heart-wrenching sorrow at its demise as she witnesses the trail of tears – that tragic moment when the Indians left the prairie forever. In later books she shares with us the beauty and the angst of youth and permits us to witness the sacred and sensitive courting by the man who was eventually to be her husband.
It is a generous and open doorway into a beautiful life that was well lived and filled with love. She reveals herself to be a person of high standards who has a reverence for and oneness with nature. Everything she touches, she touches with love and she teaches and inspires us to do the same. It is easy to see why her beautiful books have made her into a household name in America and well known and loved the world over, inspiring the hit television series in the 1970’s Little House On The Prairie. Her books warm and transform the reader and are loved by both children and adults.