On the Banks of Plum Creek: Chapters 1–19

The dim wagon track went no farther on the prairie, and Pa stopped the horses.

“A dugout. We’ve never had to live in a dugout yet.”

“It’s only till I harvest the first wheat crop,” said Pa. “Then you’ll have a fine house and I’ll have horses and maybe even a buggy. This is great wheat country, Caroline! Rich, level land, with not a tree or a rock to contend with. I can’t make out why Hanson sowed such a small field. It must have been a dry season, or Hanson’s no farmer, his wheat is so thin and light.”

Willow boughs had been laid across and their branches woven together, but here and there the hay that had been spread on them showed through.

Little pale-yellow and pale-blue butterflies hovered there, and alighted and sipped.

They went past the cattle path and the rushes, past the willow valley and the plum thickets.

The water came up under their skirts and made them float. Then the calico got wet and stuck to their legs.

“Wh—at?” Laura quavered.

Ma turned the strips of muslin and pinned them together, and Laura whipped the new seam, over and over with tiny stitches.

Eyes rolled and tongues licked flat noses; heads tipped wickedly to gouge with fierce horns.

“Reet?” Ma repeated. “What outlandish name is that?”

He yoked Pete and Bright to the wagon, and he hauled the hay and made six big stacks of it over there.

They threshed Pa’s stack of wheat.

Laura heard the harsh machinery noises while she drove Spot through the dewy grass, and when the sun rose chaff flew golden in the wind.

“We won’t, Pa,” Laura said, earnestly, and Mary said, “No, Pa, we won’t.”

The prairie was almost the tawny color of the hay-stacks.

Pa took up the ox goad.

Laura let her hold Charlotte, and she jounced Charlotte up and down and flung her against the wall.

Laura waited in the dark till she heard Sam and David splashing into the ford.

They went through the prairie grasses and up to the top of a green knoll, where Pa and Mr. Nelson were building the new house.

They shingled the roof with boughten shingles.

Boughten shingles were thin and all the same size; they were far finer shingles than even Pa could hew with an ax.

Under it, a shelf like an oblong pan stuck out.

That was the same smiling little shepherdess, with golden hair and blue eyes and pink cheeks, her little china bodice laced with china-gold ribbons and her little china apron and her little china shoes.

“I know, little half-pint,” said Pa, “but it isn’t everybody that gets a chance to learn to read and write and cipher. Your Ma was a school-teacher when we met, and when she came west with me I promised that our girls would have a chance to get book learning. That’s why we stopped here, so close to a town that has a school. You’re almost eight years old now, and Mary going on nine, and it’s time you begun. Be thankful you’ve got the chance, Laura.”