Summary

In this chapter, Fraser examines Laura Ingalls Wilder's ancestry. Wilder was born near Lake Pepin, formed where the Mississippi River meets the smaller Chippewa and presided over by a large limestone bluff called Maiden Rock. Charles Ingalls grew up near Maiden Rock, and he brought his daughters there to gather pebbles when they were little. Fraser writes about the difficulty in tracing the Ingalls's story in America, as the family was always poor, and the poor leave few records. Their existence, from the first ancestor who arrived in America (one Edmund Ingalls who arrived in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1628) was marked by struggle and poverty. Later, another ancestor named Martha Ingalls Allen Carrier, was accused of witchcraft in Salem and later hanged.

Laura's great-grandfather, Samuel Ingalls, born in New Hampshire in 1770 and later moved to Canada, where he wrote poetry, including "A Ditty...