A receipt for that little house on the prairie

Today’s post comes from Cody White, archivist at the National Archives at Denver.

Today marks the 178th anniversary of Charles Ingalls’s birth!

A simple farmer born in Cuba, New York, Ingalls would have likely languished in obscurity had not his second-born daughter Laura taken her childhood recollections and parried them into a timeless and award-winning series of children’s books.

In this page from a register of homestead receipts from the Dakota Territory, we see the line entry for the Ingalls homestead in DeSmet, South Dakota, the family’s final stop in a long series of homes that stretched across present-day Wisconsin, Iowa, Kansas, and Minnesota.

“Register of Final Homestead Receipts, December 9, 1871-May 21, 1891,” NARA identifier 7385822, RG 049 Records of the Bureau of Land Management, Entry 97.

Several years after proving up on his claim, Ingalls moved into town where he worked a variety of jobs before passing away in 1902. The DeSmet News ended his obituary with this description: “As a citizen he held high esteem, being honest and upright in his dealings and associations with his fellows. As a friend and neighbor he was always kind and courteous, and a faithful and loving husband and father.”

For those fans of Little House on the Prairie, Pa’s DeSmet homestead is a tourist attraction today, still featuring the original cabin Charles Ingalls built for his family over 120 years ago.

The National Archives also holds the papers of Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, at the Hoover Presidential Library.

Where this page came from

This page was imported from National Archives, Pieces of History. Published on the National Archives' Pieces of History blog and, as a work of the United States government, in the public domain; pictures credited elsewhere are left out.

Nobody has written it yet — it is the source material at a new address, which is why search engines are asked to skip it and why no one earns from it. It is up for grabs: take it on, and it is yours to rewrite and to earn from.