Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder

by Caroline Fraser

LARGELY forgotten outside of Minnesota, the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862 was among the most pivotal in American history. More white Americans died that summer in Minnesota than were killed at the Battle of the Little Bighorn or at any other military engagement in the Plains Indian Wars.

By 1867, there were only fifty Dakota left in Minnesota.67 That year, a baby girl was born just across the Mississippi, in a little house in the Big Woods.

But one thing would never fade away: the belief in self-reliance as an absolute sacrament.

Charles Ingalls never seemed to realize that his ambition for a profitable farm was irreconcilable with a love of untrammeled and unpopulated wilderness.

The locust plague constituted the worst and most widespread natural disaster the country had ever seen, causing an estimated $200 million in damage to western agriculture (the equivalent of $116 billion today) and threatening millions of farmers in remote locations—far from social services in the cities—with starvation.

The drought was in large part created by the settlers themselves. The Dakota Boom had upended an ecosystem, with dramatic and near-immediate results. After the rapid removal of bison and the interruption of a fire regime eons in the making, more than two and a half million acres of native grasses had been abruptly cleared and plowed within a decade. This stripped out organic matter available to crops, and had profound effects on temperature and climate.

From covered wagons, Wilder had graduated to the aviation age,