Little Homestead on the Prairie

“It wasn’t Susan’s fault that she was only a corncob.”

I’m standing in the middle of a field, cradling a freshly shucked cob of corn in my hands, and hearing that phrase ringing through my head. The dried cob was not much to look at, a faded husk of its former self. But as I wrapped a piece of purple patterned fabric around its length and tied it with a gold string, it was now a re-creation of a humble toy that I’d desperately wanted as a child. With the South Dakota prairie wind whipping around me, I started imagining once again that I was a young Laura Ingalls Wilder, living my own Little House on the Prairie fantasy.

Corncob doll-making is just one of many activities — along with hay twisting, pony rides, and washing clothes by hand — on the Ingalls Homestead in De Smet, South Dakota, a tourist attraction that now draws more than 20,000 visitors every year. Over the course of eight books in the iconic Little House on the Prairie series published between 1932 and 1943, Wilder chronicled her life — or at least, a highly romanticized version of her life — on the prairie frontier. Wilder spent her formative years traversing across Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, and eventually South Dakota as her family — and thousands of other pioneers — moved west in search of a homestead. It was, objectively, a brutal way to live. Settlers faced starvation, disease, and violent conflict with the Indigenous people whose land and other resources they were remorselessly stealing. Many of these settlers died or gave up and returned home, and most of the rest just scraped by. But looking across these expanses of farmland, it’s easy to see how, then and now, these wide open spaces could be interpreted as a uniquely American type of freedom.

In 1879, the Ingalls family of six settled in De Smet in the hope of taking advantage of the Homestead Act of 1862 to finally own their own land. The act entitled each pioneer who could “prove up,” or build a home and farm at least 10 acres for five years, to 160 acres of land in what was then known as the Dakota Territory. De Smet is, essentially, where Laura Ingalls grew up. Here, she taught her first students in a one-room prairie school at the tender age of 15. It’s where her father, Charles, planted his first successful crops, and where she met Almanzo Wilder, the man 10 years her senior who would become both her husband and the subject of his own book, Farmer Boy.

Standing on the Ingalls Homestead is deeply affecting. More than 100 years after the events in Little Town on the Prairie, set in De Smet, it is still easy to envision Laura and her sister Mary playing in the fields while Pa plows. Here, I’m 8 years old all over again, jarred back into a time when seeing the real-deal Ingalls homestead would have been the highlight of my life. I barely resist the urge to emulate the 12-year-old Laura and go chase frogs in the creek.

“‘This earthly life is a battle,’ said Ma. ‘If it isn’t one thing to contend with, it’s another. It always has been so, and it always will be. The sooner you make up your mind to that, the better off you are, and more thankful for your pleasures.” — Little Town on the Prairie, 1935

Even though I almost immediately wanted to get away from it, I am also a child of the prairie. I was born in Louisiana but grew up in northeast Texas, where the plains meet the piney woods. A bookish kid (read: nerd), I inherited my mom’s illustrated Little House on the Prairie paperbacks and saw a lot of myself in Laura’s personal sense of justice, her stubbornness, her insistence on always being right. I remember feasting on details about how Laura’s father butchered a hog, and once its constituent parts had been smoked, salted, and stored away for the winter, how Pa blew up the pig’s bladder like a balloon for Laura and her older sister Mary to play with. (An illustration by Garth Williams II memorializes the iconic scene: two tiny girls batting about a porcine bladder tied with string.)

I was so enraptured by Laura’s hardscrabble upbringing that I frequently tried to re-create it myself. I would tie a bath towel around my waist, a makeshift apron, over one of my mom’s long broomstick skirts and put on a pair of lace-up booties, then flit around the pasture behind my childhood home. For a little while, there was no one on earth I wanted to be more than Laura, and I was not the only kid who felt this way.

Between 1932 and the present, more than 73 million copies of the books have been sold worldwide, and they’ve been translated into 26 languages. The 1974 television series Little House on the Prairie, starring then-heartthrob Michael Landon, was its own global phenomenon that ran for nine seasons and captivated a new generation of fans. The books continue to be popular with young readers, though some have called for them to be removed from school curricula due to their anti-Native sentiment and racist language. In 2021, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s name was removed from a major children’s literature award for the same reasons.

But many still feel a deep connection to the Ingalls family, arguably the prairie’s most famous pioneers. “[Wilder’s] books have exercised more influence, across a wider segment of society, than the thesis of Frederick Jackson Turner, which held that American democracy was shaped by settlers conquering the frontier,” writes Caroline Fraser in her Pulitzer Prize-winning 2017 book Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder. “Their place in our culture continues to evolve.”

In her role as operations manager of the Ingalls Homestead, Ann Lesch welcomes thousands of visitors, many outfitted in prairie dresses and sunbonnets, each year. When Lesch’s parents purchased the Ingalls Homestead in the 1990s, the land was being used for commercial farming, like much of the land around it. But they set out to restore it to what it might have looked like when the Ingalls family lived there, adding other educational elements intended to tell their story. Fans start at the visitors’ center and gift shop, where those who have come ill prepared can buy their own sunbonnets, covered-wagon magnets, and copies of The Little House Cookbook. From there, a sparse paper map sends visitors on a self-directed trail back in time.

A short walk away, there’s a sod dugout home built into the side of a wildflower-covered hill, inspired by the home the family lived in for a time in Walnut Grove, Minnesota. I’m just over 5 feet tall, and I can barely stand up straight in much of the structure. A couple of printouts, laminated so they’re protected from the sod house’s inherent dampness, tell visitors how much it would have cost to build the home in 1874 ($2.78, give or take a half cent) and how settlers built them by stacking thick bricks of chopped sod. Not far away sits a tar paper shanty, a physical illustration of another type of temporary home that the Ingalls and other settlers lived in as they waited for the money and resources to build more permanent housing. They are both almost unbelievably small, cramped, and dark, each outfitted with a period-appropriate wood stove that served as the center of the space where meals were cooked, clothes were washed, and near-frozen extremities were warmed.

“When I read the books as a kid, I used to wonder why Laura wanted to play outside all the time,” Lesch says. “When you step inside of the sod house, and feel for yourself how small it is, you start to understand why she felt that way.”

None of these buildings are original to the property; they’re modern re-creations built entirely for educational purposes, to stir that sense of understanding that Lesch is talking about. A few remaining homes built and lived in by the Ingalls still exist, but those are located elsewhere, a five-minute drive away in downtown De Smet, where visitors can tour the school that Laura and her sister Carrie attended, along with the Surveyors House, a small home that the Ingalls family lived in briefly after moving to the town. There, Laura Ingalls Wilder Historic Homes executive director Mary Jo Wertz displays pickles, canned peaches, and saltine crackers, a re-creation of a meal the Ingalls enjoyed shortly after arriving in De Smet in the actual room where it was likely eaten.

Crops still grow on the Ingalls Homestead, but they are a symbol of the past, not a source of revenue. Ten acres of wheat, oats, and (of course) corn are planted on the property to represent the acreage that Charles Ingalls was required to farm in the 1880s to earn this stolen land. The oats feed the homestead’s horses, the wheat is used in its wheat-grinding demonstrations throughout the year, and the corn is dried, shucked, and transformed into corncob dolls like mine. This wasn’t an especially good year for the wheat, but the corn was thriving when I visited in mid-August. “We keep planting because a lot of people who visit us haven’t been on a farm, they don’t know what 10 acres really looks like, and this helps them visualize what Pa Ingalls had to do to make it work,” Lesch says. “We want this to be a place where people can come and learn.”

Here, visitors learn by doing work. Groups of elementary schoolers use lye soap made on the homestead to scrub clothes on a washboard, pump water by hand, and twist thick bolts of hay into a re-creation of the fuel that kept the Ingalls home warm during the coldest, leanest winters. Sitting on the covered wagon, bumpily pulled by lumbering draft horses across the fields where Laura played and Charles plowed, I listen to a family visiting from Canada as they recite, from memory, full passages from By the Shores of Silver Lake, written about this very land. They, too, were feeling it.

Little House on the Prairie is, of course, not the only depiction of the American West that has burrowed deeply into the American psyche. We are fascinated by the idea of going out into the great unknown in search of discovering something better, of taming land that has no desire to be tamed. The 1960s and 1970s, the era of John Wayne westerns, Bonanza, and Gunsmoke, were arguably the peak of this interest, but it is no less omnipresent today. Look to the cultural juggernaut that is Taylor Sheridan’s Yellowstone, the western soap opera that has spawned its own cinematic universe, as proof. Like the Ingalls, Yellowstone’s modern-day Duttons are the descendants of homesteaders. As it turns out, the rustic appeal of the self-sufficient homestead — that wealth, or at the very least, stability, is possible with simply some stubborn hard work — is as American as apple pie.

“A farmer depends on himself, and the land and the weather. If you’re a farmer, you raise what you eat, you raise what you wear, and you keep warm with wood out of your own timber. You work hard, but you work as you please, and no man can tell you to go or come. You’ll be free and independent, son, on a farm.” — Farmer Boy, 1933

As you approach Lennox, South Dakota, about two hours away from the De Smet homestead, vast cornfields welcome you to town. Sandwiched in between the massive fields of grain, much of which is destined to become fuel instead of food, is Good Earth Farm, a micro-farm and animal sanctuary operated by Nancy and Jeff Kirstein. The Kirsteins’ farm occupies a quarter section of an original homestead that was established sometime in the late 1880s — just a decade after the Ingalls arrived in De Smet — and stayed in that family until they bought the land in 2011. It’s easy to see why they landed there; the property is beautiful, a sprawling landscape covered in lush grass “blowing in waves of light and shadow,” as Wilder would have described it. When I pull up in the driveway, I’m greeted by the farm’s newest resident, a piglet named Kevin, who lives alongside a menagerie of more than 30 critters that includes a miniature bull, goats, chickens, geese, and heritage-breed pigs, all of whom were rescued from one unfortunate circumstance or another.

Nancy grew up on a farm in Iowa, and both she and her husband relished the opportunity to work the land and spend most of their time outdoors. As they worked to remodel the original barn and repair long-neglected structures on the property, some built by the original owners in the 1800s, they dreamed of establishing a community-supported agriculture (CSA) model, where they could sell the vegetables they grew directly to their neighbors.

For a time, it worked well enough. The Kirsteins were never able to fully make a living — after every growing season was finished, they’d go get other jobs — but the CSA eventually grew to include about 450 members and brought in a decent seasonal income. As it grew, however, so did the work, and eventually, it just became too much, even with summer interns and occasional part-time help. Though she didn’t have to rely on horse-drawn plows or the entire town to show up to help with the harvest as in Ma and Pa Ingalls’s days, the labor was overwhelming. “We tried to make that our primary way of making a living, but it just wasn’t feasible,” Nancy Kirstein says. “When we talk about sustainability, we also mean what’s sustainable for us physically, as humans. And then there’s also what is sustainable financially. All of those pillars have to be there for this to work.”

“Critical or adoring scholars and readers might agree about one thing: the Little House books are not history,” Fraser writes in Prairie Fires. “Yet the truth about our history is in them. The truth about settlement, about homesteading, about farming is there, if we look for it — embedded in the novels’ conflicted, nostalgic portrayal of transient joys and satisfactions, their astonishing feats of survival and jarring acts of dispossession, their deep yearning for security. Anyone who would ask where we came from, and why, must reckon with them.”

Though the Kirsteins don’t know much about the farmers who worked their land before them, they do know that “this piece of property was for subsistence. They got it to where they could sustain, but they couldn’t thrive,” Kirstein says. “Why did we think we could do it differently? If you travel around here, you see all these small farms in various states of disrepair because people just can’t afford to keep them up.”

This has always been the challenge of farming: growing enough to sustain a family under the best of circumstances. Even with modern advances, the labor is strenuous, and farmers must weather the capriciousness of financial markets. They are increasingly squeezed by the rising cost of seeds, water, fuel, and fertilizer. “When you think back to the Homestead Act, if you don’t know any better, it’s easy to think that 160 acres could feed a family,” Kirstein says. “But there’s no way, not unless you’re growing a high-profit crop, and you’re growing it very intensely. You have to have lots of equipment and labor, and I just don’t know how it would work.”

And when the whims of nature — increasingly unpredictable thanks to climate change — are particularly cruel, farmers can see their entire livelihoods ruined in a matter of days. In 2023 alone, extreme weather caused upwards of $21 billion in crop losses across the country. In the 1880s, as his daughter would chronicle in Little House on the Prairie (1935), Charles Ingalls saw his first wheat crop in De Smet completely destroyed by a hailstorm. In 2024, cataclysmic flooding hit the Good Earth Farm, submerging the patches the Kirsteins used to grow corn and sunflowers under more than 20 inches of rain in just a few days. They also lost their beehives. Now, the land sits empty, waiting for them to plant a cover crop this fall to try it all again next year.

There is an eminently comforting quality to Laura Ingalls Wilder’s writing; in particular, her descriptions of eating and cooking are often burned into my mind. Of that aforementioned pig’s tail that Ma and Pa skewered and roasted over coals, she writes in Little House in the Big Woods: “It sizzled and fried, and drops of fat dripped off it and blazed on the coals. Ma sprinkled it with salt. Their hands and fingers got very hot, and Laura burned her finger, but she did not care.” This level of straightforward detail, told through the eyes of a child, is so transportive that you can almost smell the roasting pork.

But more crucially, Wilder’s prose inhabits a sense that against all odds, everything is going to be okay, even in situations that are objectively terrifying. In The Long Winter (1940), she depicts the brutal cold of 1881, when it snowed so much that the trains that brought food, fuel, and other essentials couldn’t make it down the tracks. “Laura felt a warmth inside her. It was very small, but it was strong,” Wilder wrote of the tireless labor that went into grinding seed wheat into flour, using a hand-cranked coffee mill, so the family would have something to eat. “It was steady, like a tiny light in the dark, and it burned very low but no winds could make it flicker because it would not give up.”

I know now that these stories were carefully constructed to leave out how close the family was to starvation during this period, how the Dakota winters meant being stuck inside a tiny cabin for months, waiting for the snow to melt. They were not written, though, to glorify the suffering but to telegraph Laura’s specific morality, passed down in large part from Ma and Pa, in which doing the right thing is of paramount importance, perseverance is the only path to success, and Ma and Pa Ingalls can always be counted on to do both. The Ingalls family handles their setbacks with dignity and grace, no matter how unfair. In these books, the good guys win, the bad guys lose, and everyone who works hard gets ahead — eventually. As a kid, when everything seems so much simpler, it’s easy enough to believe Wilder’s gentle insistence that even with such meager resources, happiness could be found.

Wilder was a skilled architect of her own mythology, shaping her family into virtuous frontier heroes. Ma and Pa spent their days hunting and cooking and cleaning and preserving to keep food in their family’s bellies; Wilder’s romantic depictions of the manual work required of frontier life are captivating in their foreignness to modern readers, but also emphasize the persistence required for the family to achieve any semblance of independence. “Neither they nor their neighbors begged for help,” Wilder said of her parents during a 1936 speech to a women’s organization. “No other person, nor the government, owed them a living…. And they found their own way. Their old-fashioned character values are worth as much today as they ever were to help us over the rough places. We need today courage, self-reliance, and integrity.”

Wilder’s own tenacity, desire for self-sufficiency, and insistence on hard work are inextricably — and deliberately — woven into the text within Laura the character, where she links them to her pursuit of the “American dream,” such as it has ever existed. “Americans won’t obey any king on earth. Americans are free. That means they have to obey their own consciences,” Wilder wrote in Little Town on the Prairie. “Her whole mind seemed to be lighted up by that thought. This is what it means to be free. It means, you have to be good.” (It’s really no wonder that her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, a controversial journalist, author, and political demagogue deeply influenced by her own experiences on the prairie, would go on to play a major role in the modern Libertarian movement alongside her friend Ayn Rand.)

There is, I think, something innate, a sort of preternatural desire in some people that insists that they work the land — or at least, some people identify with the belief that this is virtuous work, the kind that can satisfy your soul and improve the world around you. That cultural belief is partially behind the current homesteading resurgence (and explains why many partaking in it are stars on social media). It’s what drives someone like Daniel Neeleman, the husband of tradwife influencer Hannah Neeleman, to use his wealth to start a place like Ballerina Farm in Utah, or Jill Winger, the homesteader who promises to help her nearly 200,000 Instagram followers “reclaim what modernity has stolen” as she posts videos of herself riding horses and growing abundant crops in a greenhouse. Whether or not making a living by homesteading — presuming you’re not an influencer with tens of thousands of followers — is actually possible is another question entirely. But the illusion that it could persists, and so does that impulse to get back to the land.

After they decided to end the CSA in 2023, the Kirsteins shifted to a new model that’s been increasing in popularity in recent years, including in South Dakota: agritourism. In 2017, TravelSD, the state’s tourism board, identified agritourism as a “niche area of development” for the state. In 2023, it introduced AgritourismSD, a two-year program in which local farmers learn from other farmers how to successfully integrate agritourism into their business model. Good Earth Farm was one of 16 farms in the initiative’s first class, and another 10 South Dakota farms are currently enrolled in the program.

As they pivoted, the Kirsteins purchased a massive outdoor pizza oven and began inviting people to come to the farm two days a week for pizzas topped with the produce they grew. Jeff got a day job, leaving Nancy to care for the animals and tend to the plants. The change came as a major relief, alleviating some of the financial and physical pressures. It also was quickly a hit with locals and folks in nearby Sioux Falls, who love to bring their families out to the farm and eat pizza at picnic tables overlooking the property’s gently rolling hills.

This summer, the Kirsteins served pies topped with locally sourced bison meat and farm-grown onions, one of the few crops that survived the floods. Like the Ingalls, they are making do. Nancy Kirstein also planted several rows of cheery pink and orange zinnias, which greet customers as they come up the drive. “It hasn’t been easy by any means, but I’m now at a point where I can contribute financially, and that’s really important to me,” she says. “I feel like I’m finally figuring it out now, but if we were having this conversation a year ago, I don’t think I would have been nearly as optimistic.”

Thanks to the CSA, they already had a group of customers interested in the farm and its animal-rescue work. “Fortunately, we had kind of a built-in audience that was here to support us,” Kirstein says. “Now, when people come out for our pizza nights, we see some familiar faces, but almost every week, it’s new people who want to experience what it’s like out here.”

“Then the sun peeped over the edge of the prairie and the whole world glittered. Every tiniest thing glittered rosy toward the sun and pale blue toward the sky, and all along every blade of grass ran rainbow sparkles.” ― The Long Winter, 1940

What is so distinct about the Ingalls family narrative is, mostly, that it endures. Unlike the stories of countless other pioneers, whose lives were swept away by time much like the wind took their crops, it has been rendered in vivid detail for our mass consumption.

Because of the family’s transience, there are many sites across the Midwest that boast Ingalls tourist destinations — De Smet is the last in a long line of failures for the family. Before it, they attempted to homestead in Independence, Kansas, where Charles Ingalls illegally claimed a plot of land belonging to the Osage and escaped town when he believed that federal soldiers were being dispatched to kick squatters out, and Burr Oak, Iowa, which the family fled in the middle of the night to skip out on a debt.

Fans also flock to Rocky Ridge in Mansfield, Missouri, now a museum, where Laura and her husband, Almanzo, claimed their own homestead. The two married in De Smet in 1885 and had a tumultuous journey to financial stability, with a particularly ill-advised homesteading attempt in Florida along the way. Laura and Almanzo lived at their little haven in the Ozarks until their respective deaths in 1957 and 1949. It is where she wrote the Little House books, the first of which was published when she was 65 years old, with her daughter, Rose, providing significant editing support.

The physical sites are as carefully constructed as Laura’s narratives. Like Rocky Ridge, the draw of the Ingalls Homestead is the opportunity to experience these places viscerally. To stand on the same land as Laura and Ma and Pa is to feel like you know them that much more, and the buildings constructed (and relocated to) the property are specifically intended to evoke that connection. I hadn’t picked up a Little House book in more than two decades before I started planning my trip to De Smet, and yet I was instantly enthralled upon setting foot in the town. I had to catch my breath when, standing inside the Surveyors House in De Smet, the tour guide pointed out a chest of drawers built by Charles Ingalls’s own two hands. How in the world had it survived? How were its decorative carvings so intricate? All these years later, the world of Laura Ingalls is still distinctly capable of provoking wonder.

Walking away from the homestead that day, my hair thoroughly tangled from the covered-wagon ride across the prairie, I spotted a little girl wearing a sunbonnet and prairie dress with pink princess sneakers running toward the visitors’ center, her own copy of one of the books in hand. For children and adults alike, connecting with Laura is pure escapist fantasy, a detachment from the pace and stressors of modern life — even if that lasts for only one fun afternoon on the farm or in my own moments of excitement as I brought my corncob Susan doll to life. This is sort of the opposite of what Ingalls intended, I think; her morality tales have been simplified in our memories to serve more as quaint reminders of the past. But the fantasy is what endures: There is, truly, no power like the power of American mythmaking.

This story was produced with assistance from Travel South Dakota. Read more about Eater’s ethics policies here.
Gabby Pike is a South Dakota-based commercial photographer specializing in editorial, lifestyle, and storytelling imagery. With a keen eye for detail and a passion for capturing authentic moments, she has been featured on platforms like Eater, VMSD, and MED Magazine.
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