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Laura Ingalls Wilder

New September 2007:
A visit to Almanzo's home in Malone, New York
Caroline Quiner Ingall's home, Brookfield, Wisconsin
Lake Pepin, Minnesota-Wisconsin border

What is particularly interesting to take note of in these photos (taken in April 2006) is that they were taken less than 24 hours after ice-out on Lake Pepin. If Laura's later account is accurate, the Ingalls were cutting it very close.

In July 1846 Charles Lannam visited the Lake Pepin area by coming up the river. He describes his first views:

"The next object that I would attempt to describe on my way up the Mississippi, is Lake Pepin. It lives in my memory as the Horicon of the wilderness. It is an extended portion of the Mississippi,--twenty-three miles long, and from three to four wide. It is surrounded with hills, which abound in almost every variety of game; its shores are gravelly and covered with the most valuable of agates and cornelians; the water is clear, and very deep; and it yields the very best of fish in great abundance. My first view of Lake Pepin (I wish I knew how it came by that name!) was on one of the most charming evenings that I ever witnessed. The cloudless sky was studded with stars, and the moon sailed upward and onward with an uncommon beauty, as if proud of the wilderness world she was then flooding with her beams.

"For hours did I sit musing upon the eastern shore, near the outlet, whence I could discern no less than sixteen peaks or bluffs, looming in perfect solitude against the horizon. 'The holy time was quiet as a nun, breathless with adoration.' The water was without a ripple, and reflected in its pure bosom every star, while the moon, as if determined that it should so remain for ever, spanned it with a bar of gold. The only sounds that trembled in the air were the hoot of an owl, the wail of a loon, and a hum from the insect world. I looked and wondered, until the night was far spent, and the dew upon my brow was heavy and cold."

--A summer in the wilderness; embracing a canoe voyage up the Mississippi and around Lake Superior. By Charles Lanman, 1846

Books that take place in:

(available for purchase  from Amazon.com)

Pepin, Wisconsin

Little House in the Big Woods

Laura as a young girl in the Big Woods of Wisconsin.

Little House on the Prairie

Laura and her family travel by covered wagon to the prairies of Indian Territory in southern Kansas.

Links to sites with more information:

Pepin, Wisconsin