Television: The not-so-wild West

09 July 2026, The Tablet

NETFLIX

Little House on the Prairie, based on the second volume of the series, when the Ingalls leave the big woods of Wisconsin and make their way to Kansas, following a government promise of land to turn into wheatfields

THE NINE beloved books that comprise Laura Ingalls Wilder’s autobiographical Little House in the Big Woods series have become the nearest the United States has to an original account of the settling of the West. Wherever the Ingalls family alighted in their covered wagon, in Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Kansas and Missouri, there is a log cabin or clapboard homestead that is now a museum to reckless, fiddle-playing Pa, long-suffering Ma, their daughters and the travails and triumphs of the pioneer.

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