On the Banks of Plum Creek

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On the Banks of Plum Creek is a children's book written in 1937 by Laura Ingalls Wilder. The fourth of nine books written in her Little House series, it is based on Laura's childhood at Plum Creek near Walnut Grove, Minnesota in the late 19th Century.

Plot

Having left their little house on the Kansas prairie, the Ingalls family travels by covered wagon to Minnesota and settles in a dugout on the banks of Plum Creek. Pa trades his horses Pet and Patty to the property owner (a man named Hanson, who wants to go west) for the land and crops. He later gets two new horses as Christmas presents for the family, which Laura and her sister Mary name "Sam" and "David". Pa soon builds a new, above-ground, wooden house for the family, trusting that their first crop of wheat will pay for the lumber and materials.

Now that they live near a town, Laura and Mary go to school for the first time. There they make friends, but also meet the town storekeeper's daughter, Nellie Oleson, who makes fun of Laura and Mary for being "country girls." Laura and Mary attend a party at the Olesons' home, and Ma has Laura and Mary invite all the girls (including Nellie) to a party at their house to reciprocate.

The family goes through hard times when grasshoppers (actually Rocky Mountain Locusts) decimate the much-anticipated wheat crop, and lay so many eggs that there is no hope of a crop next year. For two harvest seasons, Pa is forced to walk three hundred miles east to find work on farms that escaped the grasshopper plague.

The book ends with Laura's Pa returning safely to the house after becoming lost near their home during a severe four-day blizzard. Laura is portrayed in this book as being seven to nine years old.

Walnut Grove

Although the Ingalls family lived near Walnut Grove, Minnesota during the events described in this book,^{[citation needed]} the name of the town is not mentioned in the book.

Historical background

In real life, the Ingalls family left Kansas and moved back to Wisconsin (the setting of Little House in the Big Woods), and from Wisconsin moved to Minnesota. Laura and Mary already had attended school in Pepin, Wisconsin at the Barry Corner School. Laura was only four when she started, which made her the youngest student. Unfortunately, neither in Pepin nor in Walnut Grove could the girls attend school on a regular basis.

Jack, the family bulldog, did not come with the Ingalls family to Plum Creek. However, Laura's readers liked Jack so much that she decided to include him in this book, and also in the early chapters of By the Shores of Silver Lake. Laura used Jack's death as the transition from Laura's childhood to her adolescence.

Another aspect of Laura's life that is not included in this book is the birth of her brother, Charles Frederick Ingalls, in their home in Minnesota. The baby was never healthy, and died in 1876 while Laura and her family were living at her Uncle Peter's farm in South Troy, Minnesota. The family then moved to Burr Oak, Iowa, and subsequently back to Minnesota. These years were a painful time for the family, so Laura did not include them in her books, and By the Shores of Silver Lake begins in Minnesota once more. The omitted period of time was dramatized in Cynthia Rylant's novel Old Town in the Green Groves.