Heading West: Life with the Pioneers, 21 Activities
Introduction Itchy Feet and Moving West ne of Laura Ingalls's earliest memories was of riding in a covered wagon That's fitting because Laura spent a lot of her early life doing that Her Pa Charles Ingalls was always dreaming of mov ing west His wife Caroline said he had an itchy foot And one of Laura's uncles said Give him a covered wagon and he's ready to go Laura didn't even remember her first trip by cov ered wagon The family had left their little house in the big woods near Pepin Wisconsin and moved west to Indian Territory in Kansas But they didn't actually plan to go to Indian Territory They planned to homestead on land the government was giving away free to farmers Yet somehow they ended up on the Osage Indian Reserve If Pa had filed a claim on the land he would have known but there was so much land and he was in a hurry to build a cabin The first covered wagon trip that Laura remem bered was the trip back to Wisconsin After being gone three years Pa got a letter from the man who had bought their house in the big woods He wanted to go west and asked Pa to take back the land and the cabin Pa and Ma decided to return It took them several
weeks to get back to the big woods Laura 4 and Mary 6 sat on the bedding and blankets in the back of the wagon and looked out over the backboard at the wagon tracks behind Ma rode up front with Pa holding baby Carrie in her arms The road stretched through the Kansas prairies to the hills of Missouri then on through Iowa The little horses Pet and Patty pulled the wagon Jack the brindle bulldog trotted along beside them It often rained on that spring trip When the thunderclouds rolled in the sky Pa stopped He pulled the canvas top over the wagon and tied it down He lowered a flap of canvas over the back and secured it Ma and baby Carrie would come back and sit on the bedding with the little girls It was cozy and dry in the wagon as long as they didn't touch the canvas Poor Pa pulled his hat down over his eyes and kept on driving through the storm In one place in Missouri a stream they needed to cross was flooded Water swirled around and branches of trees went sailing by Pa found the ford where other wagons had crossed He decided to try and led the team into the foaming water The wagon shuddered and then as they got deeper it began to float Ma drove and Pa waded across The water was so deep Laura could only see his head bobbing up and down But they made it safely across Pa decided Pet and Patty were too small to pull
the loaded wagon over the hills of Missouri so he traded them for a team of bigger horses Laura cried when they had to leave the familiar little horses When Laura thought back on that trip she remembered the spring flowers among the green leaves in the forest She remembered the creaking of the wagon wheels the snorting of the horses and Pa's soft voice singing She remembered the smell of the damp earth and the meadow warm in the sun Laura was to use these memories much later to write a series of books that children still love today the Little House books Like Pa Laura was a true pio neer with an itchy foot She wanted children to understand what pioneer life was like Laura was 65 years old before her first book Little House in the Big Woods was published She had planned to write one book but children loved the book and begged her to write more That's how the series of Little House books was born Thousands of other pioneers had stories similar to Laura's Although they faced the same problems each person had his or her own way of reacting All these different personalities and stories made the set tlement of the West an interesting
Exploring the West ouncing along a bumpy trail in a covered wagon Fording a dangerous rain swollen stream Being attacked by hostile Indians Living in a cozy log cabin in the woods These were all part of the pioneer experience but there was so much more Many people think all pioneers lived in the 1800s when many settlers moved west But the Westward Movement actually began in the 1700s when settlers from Europe started moving west across the Appalachian Mountains This was when the states were still colonies They moved into the western parts of New York Pennsylvania North Carolina and what is now West Virginia Yet before anyone could settle even farther west people had to explore the region and blaze the trails French and Indian War 1754 63 By the middle of the 1700s most of the land in North America was claimed by France or England Spain owned Florida and both the French and the British claimed the land west of the Appalachian Mountains When the British started moving into the Ohio Country the French were upset Leaders of the two countries met in Paris in 1750 to discuss the
