Sixty years ago, on the edge of the Big Woods of Wisconsin, Laura Ingalls Wilder lived in a little log house miles from any neighbors and remote from any settlement. This is the story of her early childhood. One learns how life was lived and gets a vivid picture of the hardships and the difficulties, as well as of the joys and adventures, of those early pioneer days. It will give boys and girls of today a real knowledge of one phase of pioneer life.

In those days and in such remote parts of the country each home was, of necessity, virtually self-sufficient. Each family depended on the crops raised in the clearing, on the food produced by domestic animals and wild animals, birds and fish, caught and killed by the father of the family, an canned, stored, salted down or smoked by the rest of the family for the time when they would be snowed in. Life was very exciting when Christmas meant home-made toys and everyone doubling up with everyone else in order to fit two families into small space; when the "sugaring down" season meant that all the neighbors collected for miles around to attend the festivities and when bears and wolves were not uncommon.

From the dust jacket

(For 8-12 years)