

To make matters worse, in 1890, the Wilders' home burned to the ground.Īfter four years of drifting from place to place, in 1894 the Wilders bought a 200-acre farm in the Ozarks of Mansfield, Missouri. Not long after, Almanzo contracted diphtheria and was partially paralyzed. In August 1889, she had a son who tragically died within a month of his birth. In the winter of 1886, Laura gave birth to a daughter, Rose. Afterward, Laura quit teaching to raise children and help Almanzo work the farm. On August 25, 1885, the two were married at a congregational church in South Dakota. Over the course of their wagon rides home, Laura and Almanzo fell in love. During her time teaching at Bouchie School, her parents often sent a family friend named Almanzo Wilder to pick her up and bring her home for weekend visits. Just 15 years old, she signed on to teach at a one-room country schoolhouse 12 miles from her parents' home, the first of several teaching jobs. In 1882, Wilder passed the test to obtain her teaching certificate. Her family needed additional income, especially with Wilder's older sister, Mary, away at a school for the blind. Her decision to become a teacher herself was largely an economic one. They attended local schools whenever they could.

Teaching Careerīecause they had moved so often, Wilder and her siblings mainly taught themselves and each other. In 1879, they moved yet again, becoming homesteaders in the Dakota Territory, and eventually settling in De Smet, South Dakota. In the autumn of 1878, the Ingalls family returned to Walnut Grove.

Although the Ingalls family initially stayed in Walnut Grove for only two years before a failed crop forced them to move to Burr Oak, Iowa, Walnut Grove became the setting of Little House on the Prairie (1974–1982), a television show based on Laura Wilder's life. In 1874, they moved from Wisconsin to Walnut Grove, Minnesota. Wilder described her early years as "full of sunshine and shadow." When she was growing up, she and her pioneer family repeatedly moved from one Midwestern town to the next. She had an older sister named Mary two younger sisters, Carrie and Grace and a younger brother named Charles, who died at nine months old.

In her books, Wilder would later come to call the cabin "The Little House in the Big Woods." Two years after her birth, in 1869, her family moved to Kansas, which would become the setting for her book Little House on the Prairie. Wilder was born on February 7, 1867, to Charles and Caroline Ingalls in their log cabin just outside of Pepin, Wisconsin. On February 10, 1957, she died at age 90, on her farm in Mansfield, Missouri. Laura Ingalls Wilder published Little House in the Big Woods, the first of her well-known Little House series that eventually spawned the hit TV program Little House on the Prairie, in 1932. (1867-1957) Who Was Laura Ingalls Wilder?
