Authors of Days Gone By: Laura Ingalls Wilder On the Banks of Plum Creek

by Jan Drexler

Last week, I took you along on a virtual visit to Mankato, Minnesota, aka "Deep Valley" from Maud Hart Lovelace's Betsy-Tacy books. 

Be prepared for another fan-girl post, because just an hour or so west of Mankato on US Highway 14 is Walnut Grove, the location of Laura Ingalls Wilder's "On the Banks of Plum Creek."

Yes, that's a picture of Plum Creek. THE Plum Creek!

Wild plum thicket along Plum Creek

If you've read "On the Banks of Plum Creek," you'll remember Laura's description of the dugout they lived in for the first year:

"It was one room, all white. The earth walls had been smoothed and whitewashed. The earth floor was smooth and hard...
Ma was pleased. She said, "It's small, but it's clean and pleasant." Then she looked up at the ceiling and said, "Look, girls!"
The ceiling was made of hay. Willow boughs had been laid across and their branches woven together, but here and there the hay that had been spread on them showed through.
"Well," said Ma.
They all went up the path and stood on the roof of that house. No one could have guessed it was a roof. Grass grew on it and waved in the wind just like all the grasses along the creek bank."

That roped off area is the roof that caved in many years ago.

In 1947, Garth Williams traveled to all the sites of Laura's books in preparation for his illustrations of the new edition of the series, "newly illustrated and uniform," published in 1955. His illustrations are the ones that I grew up with, and his research and attention to detail are wonderful.

In the years since the Ingalls family had left Walnut Grove, no one remembered that the Ingalls family had homesteaded here. The farm had been purchased by the Gordon family earlier in 1947, and Garth Williams is the one who told them of the historical significance.

The Gordon family still owns the property and have maintained access to the dugout site for visitors through the years.

The current generation of Gordons works with the Department of Natural Resources' Prairie Conservation Plan to restore and preserve many acres of native prairie.

They have also established walking trails, allowing visitors to experience the prairie as Laura did when she was a child.

The "Tablelands:"

"Then it was almost chore time and they had to go home. They went dripping along the path through the tall grass, and when they came to the tableland Laura wanted to climb it.
Pa climbed part way up, and Laura and Mary climbed, holding to his hands. The dry dirt slipped and slid. Tangled grass roots hung down from the bulging edge over head. Then Pa lifted Laura up and set her on the tableland.
It really was like a table. That ground rose up high above the tall grasses, and it was round, and flat on top. The grass there was short and soft." 

The creek:

"The flat creek bank was warm, soft mud. Little pale-yellow and pale-blue butterflies hovered there, and alighted and sipped. Bright dragonflies flew on blurry wings. The mud squeezed up between Laura's toes. Where she stepped, and where Mary stepped, and where the oxen had walked, there were tiny pools of water in their footprints."

The birds:

"All along Plum Creek the birds were talking. Sometimes a bird sang, but mostly they talked. Tweet, tweet, oh twitter twee twit! one said. The another said, Chee, Chee, Chee, and another laughed, Ha ha ha, tiraloo!" 

 This bird is a Lark Sparrow, a new addition to our life-list of bird sightings! I would describe their song the way Laura did: Tweet, tweet, oh twitter twee twit!

And all around is the prairie:

"Laura and Mary stayed near the wagon, where Jack was. They looked at the prairie grasses swaying and bending, and yellow flowers nodding. Birds rose and flew and sank into the grasses. The sky curved very high and its rim came nearly down to the faraway edge of the round earth."

We could have lingered on the banks of Plum Creek for hours - it was that lovely. But while we were there, I remembered how the Ingalls family's three years here were full of sorrow. Between the crop failures, the unrelenting locusts, hard winters, the loss of their baby son, the year living in Burr Oak, Iowa, and finally Mary's illness and loss of her vision, the Walnut Grove years were sad ones.

But Laura skimmed over those hardships in her stories. As she was writing them, she told her daughter Rose (who was also her primary editor) that she didn't want "a recital of discouragement and calamities." My feeling is that Laura saw her stories as memoirs, but not looking back at her life through an adult's eyes with an adult's understanding of the events.

Instead, Laura gave us a heartwarming and charming glimpse of a child's life - one filled with light and love - from a child's perspective.

No wonder her books are beloved by readers even more than sixty years after her death.

I've fan-girled enough for one day. Next week, we'll follow the Ingalls family west to De Smet, South Dakota, where the last five books of her series take place.

Did you read the Laura Ingalls Wilder books, or do you know Walnut Grove from the television show? Either way, a visit to Plum Creek was a delightful side trip if you ever get to Minnesota!

Jan Drexler has always been a "book girl" who still loves to spend time within the pages of her favorite books. She lives in the Black Hills of South Dakota with her dear husband of many years and their active, crazy dogs, Jack and Sam. You can learn more about Jan and her books on her website, www.JanDrexler.com.