List of Little House Books - Little House in The Big Woods

The story of the first book in the series, Little House in the Big Woods revolves around the life of the Ingalls family in their small home near Pepin, Wisconsin. The family includes mother Caroline Ingalls, father Charles Ingalls, eldest daughter Mary Amelia Ingalls, and youngest daughter (and protagonist), Laura Ingalls Wilder. In the book, Laura turns five years old, when actually the real-life author had only been three during the events of the book. According to a letter from her daughter, Rose, to biographer William Anderson, the publisher had Laura change her age in the book because it seemed unrealistic for a three-year-old to have specific memories such as she wrote about. For similar reasons and for the sake of consistency, in the later book, Little House on the Prairie, Laura portrayed herself as 6–7 years old.

Little House in the Big Woods describes the homesteading skills Laura observed and began to practice during her fifth year. The cousins come for Christmas that year, and Laura receives a doll, which she names Charlotte. Later that winter, the family goes to Grandma Ingalls’s and has a “sugaring off,” when they harvest sap and make maple syrup. They return home with buckets of syrup, enough to last the year. Laura remembered that sugaring off, and the dance that followed, for the rest of her life.

The book also describes other farm work duties and events, such as the birth of a calf, and the availability of milk, butter and cheese, gardening, field work, hunting, gathering, and more. Everyday housework is also described in detail. When Pa went into the woods to hunt, he usually came home with a deer then smoked the meat for the coming winter. One day he noticed a bee tree and returned from hunting early to get the wash tub and milk pail to collect the honey. When Pa returned in the winter evenings, Laura and Mary always begged him to play his fiddle, as he was too tired from farm work to play during the summertime.