Laura Ingalls Wilder

Born in Wisconsin near Lake Pepin on February 7, 1867, Laura was the second daughter of Caroline and Charles Ingalls. She had an older sister, Mary, and two younger sisters, Carrie and Grace, and a brother, Charles Frederick ("Freddy") who died as an infant.

When Laura was three, her father took the family to the Kansas frontier, where she fell in love with the beauty of the prairie and recalled seeing wolves and Osage Indians. They had to move when federal authorities removed them, as they were on Osage land. After returning for a time to Wisconsin, the family then moved to Minnesota and Iowa and finally to a town called De Smet in the Dakota Territory. Her father continually tried to make it as a homesteader, but he eventually moved to the town of De Smet to work as a justice of the peace and for...