Chapter 6

We woke up to an overcast day, and drove a few blocks to the South Dakota state capitol. It is our first, and there will be many more. We were surprised by how shiny and fancy it was inside. Very nice! Fun fact from their display: they bought the plans for the capital from Montana, so the buildings are pretty much the same.

As soon as we left, it started raining. We drove 2.5 hours through pouring rain to our first stop, DeSmet, home of Laura Ingalls from about age 13 to after her marriage. We were on a 2 lane highway the whole time, and every time a truck went by the other way, I was blinded by a huge spray of water. Luckily, there weren't too many trucks!

We stopped just before DeSmet in Huron to buy some groceries for lunch. It was a pretty small town, with an OLD grocery store. I was looking for hummus, which they didn't have, but they did have some lovely neon jello salads ... and fried dill pickle flavored potato chips.

In DeSmet, we went to the Ingalls museum, and joined a tour that was about to start. When Owen and I were here in 2012, we were only able to do the end of the tour, so this time, I got to see it all.We went to the surveyors' house, which Laura describes as a mansion, though it is actually quite modest. It does have a huge pantry, as she said.

Next, the tour went to 2 schools, the first school in DeSmet, which Laura attended, and a recreation of the Brewster school, where she taught. The DeSmet school had been made into a house, but when the museum bought and moved it, and started to peel away many layers of wall paper, they found the original blackboards underneath.

Next, we caravanned across town to a house that Pa built, after Laura was an adult. Interestingly, in 2012, we were not allowed to take pictures inside, but today we could. Our high-school age guide told us many interesting facts about the Ingalls family.

Then we went to the Ingalls homestead, a short way outside town. We had to eat lunch in the car because it was raining so hard. We looked around the homestead, which includes a recreated dugout, an original claim shanty (not the Ingalls's), and an exact recreation of the Ingalls shanty, as well as a barn with chickens and about 9 kittens! They were so sleepy, we couldn't wake them up at all. Another barn had a horse that was only 8 days old.

After that, we drove for 2 hours through even harder rain, to Walnut Grove, Minnesota, to the site of the Ingalls dugout on Plum Creek. Tom kept saying: thank goodness I listened when Nick told me to get new tires! The land belongs to a very prosperous looking farm, and we just drove in and dropped $5 in their collection box. We walked through the heavy rain, over Plum Creek to the site of the dugout, which is now a depression on the bank. When Owen and I were here in 2012, there was barely a trickle of water in the creek, but there was plenty today! We wondered how the current farmers knew it was the site of the Ingalls dugout. Turns out, when Garth Williams was working on the illustrations for the books, he carefully found the location of each place from tax records, and he was the one who told the current owners what was there.

After that, we drove 2 hours to Mankato, Minnesota for the night. The heavy rain and long detour added some time to the trip, but we had lots of time to examine many fields of corn. By the end, there was standing water on some of the roads, and we even saw a car that had gone off the road into a ditch full of water.