Learning About Laura - A Visit to the Little House on the Prairie Museum in Independence Kansas
Learning About Laura - A Visit to the Little House on the Prairie Museum in Independence, Kansas
By: a.d. elliott | Take the Back Roads - Art and Other Odd Adventures
While I was growing up, some of my favorite books were the Little House on the Prairie stories by Laura Ingalls Wilder. Like many readers, I encountered them as comforting tales of resilience, family, and frontier life long before I had the tools to interrogate their context.
A couple of years ago, I visited the Laura Ingalls Wilder Home and Museum in Missouri. I wandered through the rooms, marveling, once again, at the china Wilder somehow carted across the plains in a covered wagon, including her famous chicken-egg holder. I remain deeply impressed by that feat of domestic determination.
Around the same time, the Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal was renamed the Children’s Literature Legacy Award in response to the books’ depictions of Native Americans. The timing of my visit made the controversy feel personal and inescapable.
Much of the most troubling language appears in Little House on the Prairie, which recounts the Ingalls family’s brief stay near what is now Independence, Kansas. But it wasn’t Kansas when they arrived. It was the Osage Diminished Reserve, and the Ingalls family had settled there illegally.
Visiting the Little House on the Prairie Museum was, therefore, an unsettling experience. It is the place where two stories I care deeply about collide: Laura Ingalls Wilder's story and the Osage Nation's.
After the Civil War in 1865, the U.S. government began negotiating a treaty to relocate the Osage people to what is now Oklahoma. The move was expected to be completed by 1870, after which Kansas land would officially open to white settlement. But in 1868, a railroad company attempted to renegotiate and accelerate land sales. Word spread quickly, and settlers poured into the region early, assuming the government would ultimately legitimize their claims.
When the Osage people observed these settlers occupying their land, they began collecting rent payments, as permitted by earlier treaties. It was amid this tension that the deeply offensive statements attributed to Caroline Ingalls and others emerged.
Even as a child, I remember being disturbed by those words. At that point in my life, my only experience with Native American culture came from watching Grass Dancing competitions, and I couldn’t reconcile that beauty with the fear and hostility expressed in the books. Wanting to understand rather than excuse, I began looking more closely at Caroline Ingalls’s life.
Shortly after her marriage to Charles Ingalls, the couple lived in Wisconsin near the site of the Dakota War of 1862. The Dakota people, forced onto reserved lands and pressured into farming despite generations of non-agricultural lifeways, faced a devastating winter, crop failures, and delayed federal payments due to the Civil War. Local traders refused to extend credit. Starvation followed. Starvation rarely makes people kinder.
On August 17, 1862, desperate Dakota fighters attempted to reclaim their lands near Mankato, Minnesota. The conflict was brutal. With federal forces tied up elsewhere, fighting dragged on until late September. At least 350 settlers died, and after the war, 38 Dakota men were publicly executed, the largest mass execution in U.S. history.
The violence, trials, and executions were sensationalized by the press. Panic spread. Caroline Ingalls, like many others, lived in fear. Fear rarely makes people kinder.
By 1870, Caroline was an anxious woman living illegally on Osage land, caring for two small children and a newborn. It is not hard to imagine how every Osage man collecting rent would have felt like a threat to her safety. While fear does not excuse prejudice, it does help explain how it took root. One cannot help wondering whether Charles Ingalls’s restless optimism crossed into irresponsibility.
As Laura Ingalls Wilder herself later acknowledged, the U.S. government ultimately honored its treaty obligations and forced the settlers to leave the Osage lands. That forced departure is recounted in the Little House on the Prairie.
Locating the actual cabin site proved difficult for historians, precisely because no legal land claims had been filed. Researchers relied on journal entries, birth records, the fact that Carrie Ingalls was born there, and gaps in land filings. In 1969, the hand-dug well described in the book was discovered, confirming the site.
The museum, established in the late 1970s, includes a reconstructed log cabin, the Wayside Post Office from 1885, and the Sunnyside Schoolhouse built in 1871, both relocated to preserve them. The site offers visitors a tactile understanding of settler life on the plains, its ingenuity, hardship, and limits.
Despite the complexity of its history, I had a wonderful time visiting. I felt the pull of childhood nostalgia, tempered now by adult understanding. Growth, I think, often looks like holding two truths at once.
The museum is open Monday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and on Sundays from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. A $3 donation is requested to keep the site operational. The gift shop features prairie-style handicrafts and Little House memorabilia.
I made sure to buy a small tin mug, just like Laura’s.
xoxo,
a.d. elliott
About the Author
a.d. elliott is a wanderer, photographer, and storyteller traveling through life
She shares her journeys at Take the Back Roads, explores new reads at Rite of Fancy, and highlights U.S. military biographies at Everyday Patriot.
You can also browse her online photography gallery at shop.takethebackroads.com.
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