South Dakota: De Smet – Ingalls Family Home

🏡 Little House, Big Feelings: Following the Ingalls Family Across South Dakota

We’ve done some daft things on this trip around the United States. We’ve queued in the heat to see things that turned out to be considerably less impressive than the brochure suggested. We’ve driven miles out of our way for a burger that various internet strangers assured us would change our lives. It didn’t. But one of the more unexpected threads running through our journey has been a self-imposed challenge to track down the real locations where the Ingalls family — yes, those Ingalls — actually lived.

For anyone who’s somehow missed it, the Ingalls family were the stars, more or less, of Little House on the Prairie, the long-running American television series that ran from 1974 to 1983. I have very fond memories of watching it as a younger man — the wholesome stories, the bonnets, the alarming frequency with which things went badly wrong for people who were just trying to grow some wheat. It was one of those programmes that seemed to be on permanently, and I absorbed rather more of it than I probably care to admit.

What many people don’t fully appreciate is that the Ingalls were entirely real. They weren’t invented for television. Their lives were documented — beautifully, it must be said — by Laura Ingalls Wilder, who was the second of five children born to Charles and Caroline Ingalls. Laura wrote a series of nine books, beginning with Little House in the Big Woods in 1932 and ending with These Happy Golden Years in 1943. She was in her mid-sixties when the first of them was published, which I find quietly encouraging, though I have no plans to write anything of the sort myself. The books drew closely on her own childhood memories and painted a vivid picture of what frontier life in the American Midwest actually looked like in the 1870s and 1880s — which was considerably harder and muddier than television tends to suggest.

The Ingalls moved around quite a bit, as families did in that era, their fortunes rising and falling with the harvests, the weather, and the particular cruelty of the American frontier. They lived in Wisconsin, Kansas, Minnesota, Iowa, and South Dakota at various points, chasing the promise of better land and better prospects. It was an era of enormous westward expansion — the Homestead Act of 1862 had opened up vast tracts of public land to settlers willing to farm it, and families like the Ingalls were part of that great, chaotic, often heartbreaking push into the interior of the continent.

One of the towns they eventually settled in was De Smet, in South Dakota — a place that sits on the flat, wind-scoured eastern plains of the state, the kind of landscape that makes you understand immediately why the winters there were so brutal. The Ingalls arrived in De Smet in 1879, coming by wagon from Walnut Grove in Minnesota, and they were among the very earliest settlers in the area. De Smet was, at that point, essentially nothing — a railway construction camp that was just beginning to organise itself into something resembling a town, as the Chicago and North Western Railway pushed its tracks westward across the Dakota Territory. Charles Ingalls, being the sort of man who never quite seemed to stay still, was involved in some of the early construction work there before eventually taking up a homestead claim outside of town.

Several members of the family spent their remaining years in De Smet. Charles — Pa, as everyone knows him — died there in 1902. Caroline — Ma — followed in 1924. Mary, the eldest daughter who lost her sight to what was likely scarlet fever or meningitis in 1879 and who attended the Iowa College for the Blind in Vinton, also returned to De Smet in her later years and died there in 1928. The town became, in a very real sense, the final chapter for much of the Ingalls story.

There is, of course, a museum. There is always a museum. And we visited it, because that’s what we do now apparently — we are people who visit museums in small South Dakota towns, and I’ve made my peace with that. The Laura Ingalls Wilder Memorial Society runs the historic sites in De Smet, and they do a genuinely good job of it. There are two main properties to see: the Surveyors’ House, which was the first building the Ingalls family lived in when they arrived in De Smet in the autumn of 1879, and the family home on Third Street, which Charles built and where the family eventually put down more permanent roots.

We toured both. The houses are small — genuinely, strikingly small — and standing inside them gives you an immediate and slightly humbling sense of how little space people managed to live in, and how little they seemed to need. The furnishings are period-appropriate and the guides are excellent, full of the kind of specific, well-researched detail that makes history feel real rather than staged. They were very good at placing the Ingalls story in its proper context — explaining what life was actually like for settlers in Dakota Territory in the late nineteenth century, the grinding work of it, the vulnerability to weather and crop failure, the complete absence of anything we’d recognise as a safety net.

The reconstructed schoolhouse was particularly evocative. Laura, Mary, and their younger sister Carrie would have attended something very much like it — a single room, a wood stove, rows of wooden desks, and a teacher who was often barely older than the pupils. Laura herself taught school from the age of fifteen, which is the sort of fact that makes you feel simultaneously impressed and exhausted on her behalf.

We’ve had a number of moments on this trip that have stopped us in our tracks a bit — times when the weight of what we were looking at suddenly landed properly. Standing outside Graceland in Memphis, knowing that Elvis Presley died there in August 1977 at just forty-two years old. Visiting the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, where Martin Luther King was shot on the balcony on the 4th of April 1968, a date that still carries an awful heaviness. These moments have a way of cutting through the tourist business and reminding you that history isn’t abstract — it happened to real people, and those people are gone.

Our final stop in De Smet had that same quality. Just outside the centre of town lies a small, quiet community cemetery, and it was here that we went to pay our respects to the Ingalls family. Several of them are buried there — Charles and Caroline, Mary, and others — their graves marked with modest, simple stones that seem entirely in keeping with the lives they lived. No grand monuments, no elaborate inscriptions. Just names and dates, set into the South Dakota ground beneath a wide, flat sky.

It’s a funny thing, standing at the grave of someone you feel you know, even though you don’t — even though they lived a century before you, and everything you know about them came from books and a television programme you watched on a Saturday afternoon decades ago. But there it was. The Ingalls family. Real people, who did real things, and whose story has lasted rather longer than most.