The Little House on the Prairie Was Built on Native American Land

Little House on the Prairie, a series of eight mostly autobiographical books about Laura Ingalls Wilder's life as a white settler on the American prairie, has been a perennial favorite ever since it was first published in 1935.  

The third book, which has the same name as the series, takes place when the Ingalls family settled on the Osage Diminished Reserve from 1869 to 1870. “The Ingalls family arrived in Kansas with a large tide of other squatters in the summer and fall of 1869,” writes Penny T. Linsenmayer in Kansas History. In the end, they moved on after federal troops threatened to remove them and other illegal settlers from Osage land, she writes.

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