page_title: Laura Ingalls Wilder
section_title: De Smet
hierarchical_section_title: Laura Ingalls Wilder / Birth and ancestry / De Smet
caption_attribution_description: English: Surveyor's House, the first home of the Ingalls family in Dakota Territory, located at the Laura Ingalls Wilder Memorial Society historic homes site, De Smet, SD.
context_page_description: Laura Elizabeth Ingalls Wilder was an American writer known for the Little House on the Prairie series of children's books, published between 1932 and 1943, which were based on her childhood in a settler and pioneer family.
  During the 1970s and early 1980s, the television series Little House on the Prairie was loosely based on the Little House books, and starred Melissa Gilbert as Laura and Michael Landon as her father, Charles Ingalls.
context_section_description: Wilder's father filed for a formal homestead over the winter of 1879–1880. De Smet, South Dakota, became her parents' and sister Mary's home for the remainder of their lives. After spending the mild winter of 1879–1880 in the surveyor's house, they watched the town of De Smet rise up from the prairie in 1880. The following winter, 1880–1881, one of the most severe on record in the Dakotas, was later described by Ingalls Wilder in her novel, The Long Winter (1940). Once the family was settled in De Smet, Ingalls attended school, worked several part-time jobs, and made friends. Among them was bachelor homesteader Almanzo Wilder. This time in her life is documented in the books Little Town on the Prairie (1941) and These Happy Golden Years (1943).
caption: Surveyor's House, the first home in Dakota Territory of the Charles Ingalls family - De Smet, South Dakota
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