Born on February 7, 1867, in a log cabin at the edge of the woods near Pepin, Wisconsin, Laura Ingalls Wilder spent her childhood as part of the great pioneering-homesteading movement in the Midwest and Great Plains. Her father's restlessness, along with hard times and some hard luck, caused the family to move several times. The first move was to the southern Kansas prairie—then known as Indian Territory—where unfortunately the Ingallses settled on land reserved for the Osage Native Americans. They decided to try Walnut Grove, Minnesota, but after a few years of farming, they suffered a grasshopper plague that wiped out the crops. In Burr Oak, Iowa, where the Ingallses were innkeepers, illness took the life of Laura's baby brother and left her sister Mary blind. The family finally settled in De Smet, South Dakota, a few scattered homesteads that they...