by Linda R. Wommack
with Stephanie Wommack White

This is Part Two of a special three-part series appearing here.

Photo: Laura Ingalls Wilder Association
The Charles Ingalls Family
Laura is in the middle,
her hand on Pa's shoulder.
In Minnesota, the family stayed awhile at the local hotel on the west side of Lake City. When Spring arrived, Pa pushed on west. Along the way, Pa played his fiddle by the campfire, lively songs of happy times and upbeat melodies. In time, the Ingalls family arrived at a small, growing town in Minnesota, called Walnut Grove. With a railroad depot, a few stores and houses, Pa saw promise, and asked around. Pa decided Walnut Grove would be their home. Their first home was a dugout in the hill of the prairie. This part of Laura’s life is depicted in On The Banks of Plum Creek. The Ingalls family quickly became a part of the community. The three young Ingalls girls attended school, met new friends and attended church on Sundays with the family. Ma and Pa helped organize the Union Congregational Church, with Reverend Edward Alden, a traveling missionary.
Pa’s goal was to become a successful wheat farmer. However, during the winter of 1874, the blizzards were especially hard, causing normal life to come to a stand-still. Trains were stalled as snow fell for days, and Laura and her sisters could not attend school. Laura later commented, “No one measured the speed of wind in those days, but it was surely as fast as hurricane speed.” Spring finally arrived and Pa built a frame house for his family and planted his wheat crop. By summer, the grasshoppers invaded and devoured every living crop in their path. Laura remembered the grasshopper invasion darkening the sky, and the buzzing sound as they descended on the prairie. “I saw their bodies choke Plum Creek,” she would later write. While many left Walnut Grove that year, Charles Ingalls would not abandon his farm. Instead, he left the family in their prairie home and walked miles and miles, gaining work here and there. Pa returned to Walnut Grove and his family in the fall of 1875. He moved his family to town, where the girls could attend school and the family would be safe for the winter. It was at this time another child was born to the Ingalls family, Charles Frederick, on November 1, 1875.
Crop failure again crunched the economy of Walnut Grove in the spring of 1875. The Ingalls family was forced to move on. They sold their property and agreed to help friends manage a hotel in Burr Oak, Iowa. Reluctantly, Charles Ingalls loaded his family and belongings in the covered wagon and headed East, not West. Laura wrote in her diary, on display at the Mansfield Museum, “This was called back-trailing. How I wish we were going west! Pa did not like to turn his back on the West either.”
Along the eastward trail to Burr Oak, the Ingalls family stopped for a visit at the home of Pa’s brother, Peter and his family. Laura was happy to be with her cousins, yet worried because baby “Freddie” was often sick. Peter and his wife, Eliza, insisted the Ingalls stay with them through the summer, before going on to Burr Oak. Baby Freddie became seriously ill as summer waned.
A doctor was called in, but could do nothing for little Freddie. Laura recounted the “awful” day of August 27, 1876, when Freddie “straightened out his little body and was dead.” Little Freddie was laid to rest not far from Peter Ingalls’ homestead.
Forty years later, Ma said she still mourned Freddie and “how different things would be if Freddie had lived.” Sad days followed, made even sadder as the day approached when the Ingalls family packed their wagon once again, this time heading south for the journey over the prairie to Burr Oak, Iowa. (The death of baby Freddie, and the Burr Oak episode in Laura’s journeys are not mentioned in her Little House series.) The Ingalls girls attended school in Burr Oak that fall, and the family attended the Congregational Church.
During the winter months, Pa and Ma chose to remove their family from the ever-present activity and noise of the hotel. Their new home, located across the street and over the grocery store, was small but comfortable, and most importantly, quiet and peaceful.
Burr Oak was not the home Charles Ingalls wanted for his growing family. Grace Pearl had been born in May of 1877.
By the summer of that year, Pa longed to be on the road west. However, he was heavily in dept with doctor bills, grocery bills, and the rent on the home in town. The Ingalls family were forced to stay in Burr Oak until the debts were satisfied.
 

Finally, in the fall of 1877, Pa sold the last of his meager holdings and left Burr Oak in the middle of the night. The covered wagon crossed the Minnesota state line and eventually the Ingalls returned to Walnut Grove.
Walnut Grove had changed very little since the Ingalls family had left. Pa built a little house in town and the family lived as townsfolk there from 1878 to 1879. Pa worked as a carpenter to keep the family going, while Ma cared for the household and sent the girls to school with old friends and new. Walnut Grove was incorporated in the spring of 1879, with Pa being elected Justice of the Peace. Yet Pa was not happy in Walnut Grove, for he wanted desperately to continue west. After ten years of wanderlust traveling, Ma made a final compromise; one more journey west. The Ingalls family would journey west to De Smet, South Dakota.
This episode of the return to Walnut Grove is the second deletion in the Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder. The return represented a turning back and therefore did not flow with her story of westward movement. It was during this period that Laura’s older sister went blind due to an illness the doctors described as “brain fever.” Laura became the caretaker for her sister and described in detail the sights that Mary could no longer see. Laura saw everything with renewed beauty and keen awareness. As her perception sharpened, so did her vocabulary and ability to relate the sights in vivid prose, so that blind Mary could experience as much as possible. This self-taught ability would be used years later when she would write the Little House series.
In 1879, the Chicago & Northwestern Railroad expanded its line from western Minnesota to Dakota Territory. The Dakota land was opened to homesteaders, and Pa found an opportunity. Charles’ brother-in-law worked for the railroad and offered Charles a job as storekeeper and bookkeeper for the railroad. The job paid fifty dollars a month and allowed Charles an income while “proving up” his homestead. Pa sold his meager holdings in Walnut Grove and left for the Dakota Territory. The family traveled by train (Laura’s first train ride), which went as far west as Tracy, where Pa met them for the trip into Dakota Territory. As the Ingalls family packed the covered wagon for their last journey, Laura Ingalls, the pioneer girl, became a prairie woman.

To be continued:
Part 3 - Mary is enrolled in the Iowa College for the Blind. Meanwhile, as Laura Ingalls begins teaching, Almanzo Wilder comes calling. Some forty-four years later, with encouragement by their daughter Rose, Laura Ingalls Wilder would finally offer her personal remembrances of pioneer life to the world.