ONCE UPON A TIME ON THE PRAIRIE

“Once upon a time, sixty years ago, a little girl lived in the Big Woods of Wisconsin, in a little gray house made of logs ....” How many times had I read those words myself as a little girl in Wisconsin? Now I was reading them aloud to my sister as we drove toward the very site where the Little House in the Big Woods once stood.

As children in Milwaukee, Karen and I were obsessed with Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House” books and dreamed of seeing the places she lived in and wrote about. Pepin, her birthplace, was just across the state from Milwaukee, but we never got around to taking our “Laura trip,” as we’d daydreamed it, until last summer.

Once we got into the planning, our “child within” selves persuaded us to leave our middle-aged businesswomen selves at home. We would try to see the Upper Midwest prairie as Laura saw it. We would camp out.

In the pioneer spirit, we borrowed a tent and gathered provisions (heavy on cinnamon graham crackers), loaded the wagon (a 1990 Mitsubishi) and set out from Milwaukee on a glorious late summer morning. Tucked in the carryall at my feet was a slip-cased set of the eight yellow volumes, and as Karen tackled the wilds of the interstate, I read aloud, chapter after chapter of pure nostalgia.

The literary Laura was based faithfully on reality.

Laura Ingalls was born in 1867 outside Pepin, a town on the Mississippi River about 60 miles southeast of Minneapolis. Dozens of towns sat along the river, a busy trade route. Right behind them was virgin forest, prime country for hunting and trapping.

Laura’s parents grew up on the Wisconsin frontier. (Her mother, Caroline, may have been the first white child born in Brookfield, now a Milwaukee suburb.) After their marriage in 1860, they joined the westward march of white settlement, from the Wisconsin forests to the vast Dakota prairie, where the U.S. government was giving away farmland to families brave enough to settle there. Young Laura was a witness to this era, and her published recollections have brought this page of American history alive for countless children all over the world.

Laura began writing in the 1920s, and “Little House in the Big Woods” was published in 1931. She didn’t intend to write a sequel, but the book was a huge success, and legions of young fans besieged her with letters asking, “What happened next?” The eight-volume series has sold an estimated 50 million copies, including translations in a dozen languages. The 1970s “Little House on the Prairie “ TV series further swelled the ranks of fans, though it was only loosely based on her story.

At Pepin, our first stop, we learned that it takes almost as much imagination to see Laura’s world in person as it did in print.

Her Big Woods are long gone. Today the hilly land is a patchwork of prosperous farms, their houses deeply shaded by huge willows. But the road outside Pepin winds so sharply that it’s clearly an old wagon track, perhaps the same one Laura traveled with her pa. This day it was carrying minivans full of young families out to her birthplace.

The Ingalls place was eight miles north of town, a day’s journey round trip by wagon. A replica log cabin, solid and spacious, stands on the property.

Laura wrote of Pepin as a lively, bustling town, and that hasn’t changed. Visitors were rummaging through a dozen antique shops, while at lakeside, amateur boat builders were displaying sleek, handcrafted wooden kayaks and dinghies. Pa Ingalls earned a comfortable living as a fur trapper, until the day came when the Big Woods were trapped out and the family joined the westward migration.

That night we had more of a pioneer experience than we had bargained for. Just after midnight, a thunderstorm of biblical proportion arose suddenly and blasted our campground with nonstop lightning and punishing wind. At one point, our tent rolled over with both of us inside it. (We later found out that 100 mph winds had been registered not far away.) Wringing out our polyester sleeping bags, we wondered how the pioneers survived such conditions.

After four hours’ driving (and a dozen more chapters), we got the answer in southwestern Minnesota. There, in a restored prairie grass landscape 20 miles east of Walnut Grove, Stan and Virginia McCone have built two authentic sod houses.

‘Little House” readers will recall Ma’s dismay at living in a “soddy” after the relative comforts of Pepin. We sympathized the minute we stepped into the “Poor Man’s House,” smelly and dark and only 18 by 18 feet.

Pioneers on the treeless plains soon figured out how to build houses using slabs of plowed sod for bricks. Though soddies gave shelter from storms and fire, they were thoroughly miserable to live in. Snakes and gophers infested the walls. In dry weather, dirt sifted down; after a hard rain, the sod ceilings dripped for days. Settlers lucky enough to have umbrellas used them indoors.

Not all soddies were this dismal. The McCones’ other replica is the “Rich Man’s Soddy,” built with plastered walls and a wood floor. The McCones rent it to overnight visitors. It looked cozy, with a parlor stove, rocking chairs and plenty of patchwork quilts on the two double beds (and, not so cozy, an outhouse).

The Ingalls soddy was on Plum Creek, north of Walnut Grove. The town comes as a shock to anyone who remembers its cheerful, bustling TV incarnation. Its Main Street is moribund, and a wagon and team could easily make a U-turn without holding up traffic. We searched in vain for someplace to eat-the only restaurant was closed-and wound up dining on canned beef stew and saltines in the municipal campground. At bedtime, we read chapters of “On the Banks of Plum Creek” by lantern light, backed by a chorus of prairie crickets.

Three miles north of town, Plum Creek flows unchanged, “rippling and glistening in the sunshine,” as Laura wrote. A sign on its steep bank marks the spot where her family lived. It takes no imagination at all to see a girl in calico scampering down to play in the shallow, sandy creek shaded by huge cottonwoods and willows.

Only a few other pilgrims were there as we waded in the cool, clear water and located Laura’s “Big Rock” half buried in silt. Wild plums ripened fat and purple in a thicket, and only poison ivy kept us from finding out if they tasted as she described.

Like other “Little House” towns, Walnut Grove capitalizes on the connection and boasts a Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum. Its guest book shows the universal appeal of the stories: By August, visitors in 2000 had signed in from 45 countries, including Libya, Peru and Barbados.

Though the museum’s exhibits on pioneer life are fascinating, there’s not much that belonged to the Ingalls clan. It’s easy to forget that they were just another poor homesteading family.

A few miles west of Walnut Grove lies Tracy, familiar to Laura fans as the end of the railroad line. There, in 1879, the family boarded a wagon that would take them into Dakota Territory.

Charles Ingalls, a teetotaler and deeply religious, had a reputation for scrupulous fairness. The Chicago & Northwestern railroad hired him as timekeeper for the quarrelsome laborers laying track across the vast, unsettled territory. The Ingalls family became the first permanent residents of De Smet, S.D., which today bills itself as “Little Town on the Prairie.” Four of the Laura books were set here, and the town is dotted with sites from them.

The railroad surveyors’ house where the Ingalls family spent one winter is open to visitors, a sturdy wooden cottage with a nest of tiny rooms and a steep stairway. We also toured the house that Pa built in town for Ma and daughter Mary in 1887, after Laura had married and moved away.

Far more evocative is the next Little House, the Ingalls Homestead, on the land a mile outside town that Pa claimed for his farm. The five cottonwood saplings he planted that first year (one for each family member) are the biggest trees for miles around, and the only survivors of 6,000 he ultimately planted.

Little else remains from that time, but Tim and Joan Sullivan, who acquired the farm in 1997, have turned it into a worthwhile attraction. There are replicas of pioneer buildings in the rolling fields, and in the main building, a video introduction describes the Dakota homesteaders’ struggle: Though government offers of free land sounded like a windfall, reality was grim. Fewer than 30% of settlers actually managed to “prove up” the land they laid claim to. To earn title of ownership, they had to raise a crop for five years-and survive the hungry seasons when the newly broken land yielded little. They also had to spend six months each year living on the property in lonely “claim shanties,” enduring fires, tornadoes and the ceaseless prairie wind that drove many to madness. The Ingalls family was among the tenacious few who succeeded. A reproduction of the Ingalls claim house on the homestead shows the family’s improving fortunes. With his railroad pay, Pa could afford a claim house built with lumber from back East, instead of the typical soddy. It had glass windows and a coal cookstove; other families cooked with “logs” of twisted straw. Pa built the house in sections, starting in 1879, and the result was airy and comfortable in hot summers.

At the Homestead, hands-on activities give the feel of pioneer life. There’s a “prairie schooner” to climb in, cramped and tippy; the rocking made travelers so nauseated that many preferred to walk the whole way, alongside the horses. There are old-time tools to try, and a barn with a real loft to play in. When we visited, there was a bonus: kittens scampering through the hay.

A horse-drawn wagon carries visitors through the fields and past Little Slough. I took a turn holding the thick leather reins, and the horses (named Pet and Patty, naturally) quickly showed they had a will of their own.

Best of all is the 1880s schoolhouse, which originally stood four miles away. Inside are calico sunbonnets and aprons for girls to put on, and straw farmer’s hats for the boys. Suitably attired, visitors then have a lesson from the “schoolmistress,” Marian Kramer (a real teacher in the local public schools), on the history of the tiny wooden building, which was used until 1960.

Kramer has spent decades investigating local history. In an oral history project in the 1970s, she interviewed old-timers who had known the Ingalls family. Her interviewees remembered Pa as a charming man with a remarkably ugly beard-I had always wondered if it looked as peculiar in life as in his portraits. And Ma was recalled as a quiet, genteel woman who, after Pa’s death, had to take in laundry for a living, but made customers use the back door so the neighbors wouldn’t see.

Camping that night on the shore of Lake Thompson, we could sense the vastness of Laura’s prairie. Wild sunflowers stood taller than our heads. Wind rushed endlessly through the undulating grass. The only other sound was the slap of waves on the stony shore. Here was Pa’s duck-hunting ground, barely changed in 120 years.

Pa prospered in De Smet, living out his days there as a carpenter and storekeeper. But for Laura and her husband, Almanzo Wilder, the first years of married life there brought only disaster-fire, crop failures, the death of a baby-culminating in Almanzo’s suffering a stroke at age 30. In 1894 they moved to southern Missouri, hoping the less severe climate would improve his health. Nothing remains of their homestead north of De Smet except a few stunted trees. “People come out here digging for valuables, even where the outdoor biff used to be,” a farmer told us from atop his tractor. “But they haven’t found a thing.”

Missouri was too far afield, and we saved it for a future trip. But we still had one intriguing stop left on this pilgrimage.

Many readers don’t know that Laura omitted one memorable chapter in her family’s odyssey. (An editor on her first book insisted that Laura could not have remembered her toddler years in the Big Woods, so Laura grudgingly made the narrator older. As the series grew, the problem compounded: too many stories and too few girlhood years left to squeeze them in.)

After two successive crop failures in Minnesota, the Ingalls family was destitute, and for a year, when Laura was 9, they lived and worked in the Masters Hotel in Burr Oak, Iowa, before Pa got the job on the railroad.

Today, Burr Oak (population “maybe 100”) isn’t even a wide place in the road, but in 1876 it was a transit crossroads, with 200 wagons passing daily. The Masters Hotel, a tidy white clapboard building, offered hot meals and five guest rooms (no more than three customers to a bed, our guide boasted). Pa ran the business, Ma cooked, and the girls-Laura, Mary and Carrie-cleaned and waited tables.

The hotel is Laura’s only home still standing on its original site, bought and restored in 1973 entirely by local volunteers. The result lives and breathes. The basement kitchen where Ma cooked dinner for 25 is cramped but cozy, the staircase where Laura hauled bedding and chamber pots treacherously steep. Bedrooms are filled with donated furniture from Burr Oak attics, some pieces draped with clothing worn by the hotel’s long-term boarder, Mr. Bisbie.

In an unpublished manuscript displayed in the parlor, visitors can read Laura’s memories of hotel life, including her comically awful singing lessons with Mr. Bisbie.

The house across the street still stands exactly as Laura described it, and down past the church where her family worshiped, the town trails off into cornfields, not much different from Laura’s day.

Most of Laura’s Little Houses are long gone, but their settings remain, the prairies and lakes, the fields and rivers. “They could not be forgotten,” the adult Laura wrote, in the concluding words of “Little House in the Big Woods,” “because now is now. It can never be a long time ago.” And our trip across the prairie showed us exactly that.

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Guidebook: On the Wilder Side

* Getting there: Minneapolis is the best point of access to the four-day, 600-mile drive described here. Northwest and Sun Country airlines fly nonstop from Los Angeles; United flies with one stop, no plane change. Fares begin at $198 round trip. (Connecting service, with change of planes: American, Delta, Frontier, United, America West.) From the Minneapolis airport, take Interstate 494 east to U.S. 10/61 (exit 63); go east on U.S. 10 for 10 miles, crossing the Mississippi River at Prescott, Wis. Turn south on Wisconsin 35 and follow the river about 20 miles to Pepin. Continue south on Highway 35 and cross the river at Winona; there, pick up U.S. 14. This is the Laura Ingalls Wilder Historic Highway, which is posted with relevant sites across the state to the South Dakota line.

* Visiting: Pepin, Wis.: The Little House Wayside is eight miles north of town on County Highway CC. Open during daylight hours. No admission charge. Information: (715) 442-3011. Walnut Grove, Minn.: The Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum, 330 8th St., is open June through August, daily 10 a.m.-6 p.m.; in May and September until 5 p.m.; in April and October until 3 p.m.; the rest of the year by appointment. Admission: adults $3, children 6-12 $1. Information: (507) 859-2358. The Ingalls Homestead Site on Plum Creek is 11/2 miles north of town on County Highway 5. Open daylight hours May through October. Admission: $3 per car. De Smet, S.D.: Combination tours of the Surveyor’s House and the Ingalls house in town begin at 105 Olivet Ave. June through August, daily 9 a.m.-7 p.m.; September, Monday through Saturday 9 a.m.-4 p.m., Sunday 12-4 p.m.; April, May and October, Monday through Saturday 9 a.m.-4 p.m.; November and March, Monday through Friday 9 a.m.-4 p.m. Adults $5, children 5-12 $2. Information: (800) 880-3383. The Ingalls Homestead is one mile southeast of town on Homestead Road. Open from Memorial Day to Labor Day, daily 9:30 a.m.-7 p.m. Admission: $4. Information: (800) 776-3594. Burr Oak, Iowa: The Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum is in Masters Hotel on the main street. Open May through October, daily 9:30 a.m.-5 p.m. Information: (319) 735-5916.

* Where to stay: The Trempealeau Hotel is an 1871 riverside inn in Trempealeau, Wis., 30 miles south of Pepin. It has homey rooms for $30-$35. Suites with spas are $100-$120. Reservations: (608) 534-6898. McCone Sod House B&B; is near Sanford, east of Walnut Grove. Rates: $90-$150. Reservations: (507) 723-5138. Prairie House Manor B&B; in De Smet was built by Banker Ruth, a minor character in the “Little House” books, in 1894. Rates: $44-$139. Reservations: (800) 297-2416.

* For more information: Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum, Walnut Grove, Minn.; tel. (507) 859- 2358, Internet https://www.walnutgrove.org. Minnesota Office of Tourism, 500 Metro Square, St. Paul, MN 55101-2146; tel. (800) 657-3700 or (651) 296-5029, fax (651) 296-2800, https://www.exploreminnesota.com.