“The Wilder Life”: A “Little House on the Prairie” road trip

When her boyfriend gave her copy of a travel guide for Wilder buffs, McClure added an itinerary of pilgrimages throughout the Midwest to her holiday plans. None of the Ingalls family’s several houses remains standing, but there are reconstructions of the little house in the big woods, the sod house from “On the Banks of Plum Creek” and, of course, the little house on the prairie. The site for the latter was once lost — Wilder and her daughter, Rose, went on a road trip in the 1930s, around the time the books were written, looking for it, but to no avail. Eventually, obsessive Wilder fans deduced the location via careful scrutiny of census and land claim records from the 1870s. They found a hand-dug well on the very spot. —“The Wilder Life”: A “Little House on the Prairie” road trip.