Read Little House on the Prairie Online Free

  Little House on the Prairie

Table of Contents

Chapter ane

Going Due west

Affiliate 2

Crossing the Creek

Chapter three

Camp on the High Prairie

Chapter 4

Prairie 24-hour interval

Affiliate v

The House on the Prairie

Chapter 6

Moving In

Affiliate 7

The Wolf-Pack

Chapter 8

Two Stout Doors

Chapter 9

A Burn down on the Hearth

Chapter 10

A Roof and a Flooring

Chapter eleven

Indians in the House

Chapter 12

Fresh Water to Drink

Affiliate xiii

Texas Longhorns

Chapter 14

Indian Camp

Chapter fifteen

Fever 'due north' Ague

Chapter 16

Fire in the Chimney

Chapter 17

Pa Goes To Town

Affiliate 18

The Tall Indian

Chapter 19

Mr. Edwards Meets Santa Claus

Chapter xx

A Scream in the Nighttime

Chapter 21

Indian Jamboree

Chapter 22

Prairie Fire

Chapter 23

Indian War-Cry

Affiliate 24

Indians Ride Away

Chapter 25

Soldiers

Chapter 26

Going Out

Petty House on the Prairie

Laura Ingalls Wilder

Illustrated by Garth Williams

Affiliate i

Going West

A long fourth dimension ago, when all the grandfathers and grandmothers of today were footling boys and footling girls or very pocket-size babies, or perhaps not even built-in, Pa and Ma and Mary and Laura and Baby Carrie left their little house in the Big Woods of Wisconsin. They drove away and left it lone and empty in the clearing amongst the big trees, and they never saw that little house once again.

They were going to the Indian country.

Pa said there were likewise many people in the Big Woods at present. Quite ofttimes Laura heard the ringing thud of an ax which was non Pa'southward ax, or the echo of a shot that did non come up from his gun. The path that went by the picayune house had get a road. Almost every 24-hour interval Laura and Mary stopped their playing and stared in surprise at a wagon slowly creaking past on that route.

Wild fauna would not stay in a country where at that place were then many people. Pa did not like to stay, either. He liked a country where the wild animals lived without being agape. He liked to see the little fawns and their mothers looking at him from the shadowy woods, and the fatty, lazy bears eating berries in the wild-berry patches.

In the long winter evenings he talked to Ma well-nigh the Western state. In the West the state was level, and there were no trees. The grass grew thick and high. There the wildlife wandered and fed as though they were in a pasture that stretched much further than a man could see, and there were no settlers. Only Indians lived there.

One solar day in the very last of the winter Pa said to Ma, "Seeing you don't object, I've decided to get run into the Due west. I've had an offer for this place, and nosotros can sell it now for as much as we're ever likely to get, enough to requite us a start in a new country."

"Oh, Charles, must we go now?" Ma said. The weather was so cold and the snug house was then comfy.

"If we are going this yr, nosotros must become now," said Pa. "We tin can't get across the Mississippi after the ice breaks."

So Pa sold the niggling house. He sold the moo-cow and calf. He made hickory bows and fastened them upright to the wagon-box. Ma helped him stretch white canvas over them.

In the thin dark before morning Ma gently shook Mary and Laura till they got upwardly. In firelight and candlelight she washed and combed them and dressed them warmly. Over their long ruddy-flannel underwear she put wool petticoats and wool dresses and long wool stockings. She put their coats on them, and their rabbit-skin hoods and their red yarn mittens.

Everything from the fiddling house was in the wagon, except the beds and tables and chairs. They did not demand to take these, considering Pa could always make new ones.

There was thin snow on the ground. The air was all the same and cold and dark. The bare trees stood up confronting the frosty stars. But in the east the heaven was stake and through the grayness woods came lanterns with wagons and horses, bringing Grandpa and Grandma and aunts and uncles and cousins.

Mary and Laura clung tight to their rag dolls and did not say anything. The cousins stood around and looked at them. Grandma and all the aunts hugged and kissed them and hugged and kissed them again, saying good-by.

Pa hung his gun to the wagon bows inside the canvas top, where he could attain it quickly from the seat. He hung his bullet-pouch and powder-horn beneath it. He laid the fiddle-box carefully between pillows, where jolting would not hurt the fiddle.

The uncles helped him hitch the horses to the wagon. All the cousins were told to osculation Mary and Laura, so they did. Pa picked up Mary and so Laura, and set them on the bed in the dorsum of the wagon. He helped Ma climb upwards to the wagon-seat, and Grandma reached up and gave her Baby Carrie. Pa swung up and saturday beside Ma, and Jack, the brindle bulldog, went under the wagon.

So they all went away from the piffling log house. The shutters were over the windows, so the little house could non see them get. It stayed there inside the log fence, behind the two big oak trees that in the summertime had made green roofs for Mary and Laura to play under. And that was the last of the fiddling house.

Pa promised that when they came to the West, Laura should see a papoose.

"What is a papoose?" she asked him, and he said, "A papoose is a little, brown, Indian infant."

They drove a long way through the snowy woods, till they came to the boondocks of Pepin. Mary and Laura had seen it once earlier, but it looked unlike now. The door of the store and the doors of all the houses were shut, the stumps were covered with snow, and no little children were playing outdoors. Big cords of forest stood among the stumps. Only ii or 3 men in boots and fur caps and vivid plaid coats were to be seen.

Ma and Laura and Mary ate bread and molasses in the wagon, and the horses ate corn from nose-bags, while inside the store Pa traded his furs for things they would need on the journey. They could not stay long in the boondocks, because they must cross the lake that 24-hour interval.

The enormous lake stretched flat and polish and white all the fashion to the edge of the grey sky. Wagon tracks went away beyond it, so far that you could not see where they went; they ended in zilch at all.

Pa collection the wagon out onto the ice, following those wagon tracks. The horses' hoofs clop-clopped with a dull sound, the carriage wheels went crunching. The town grew smaller and smaller behind, till even the alpine shop was only a dot. All around the wagon in that location was zilch but empty and silent space. Laura didn't like information technology. But Pa was on the wagon seat and Jack was under the wagon; she knew that null could hurt her while Pa and Jack were there.

At concluding the wagon was pulling up a slope of earth again, and again there were trees. In that location was a little log business firm, too, amid the trees. So Laura felt better.

Nobody lived in the little house; it was a place to camp in. Information technology was a tiny house, and strange, with a big fireplace and rough bunks confronting all the walls. Merely it was warm when Pa had built a fire in the fireplace. That night Mary and Laura and Baby Carrie slept with Ma in a bed made on the floor before the fire, while Pa slept outside in the wagon, to guard it and the horses.

In the night a strange noise wakened Laura. It sounded like a shot, but it was sharper and

longer than a shot. Once more and once more she heard it. Mary and Carrie were comatose, merely Laura couldn't sleep until Ma's voice came softly through the night. "Go to sleep, Laura," Ma said. "It's only the ice cracking."

Next morning time Pa said, "It'south lucky we crossed yesterday, Caroline. Wouldn't wonder if the ice broke upwards today. We made a belatedly crossing, and nosotros're lucky it didn't start breaking upwardly while we were out in the middle of it."

"I thought most that yesterday, Charles," Ma replied, gently.

Laura hadn't thought about it before, but now she thought what would accept happened if the ice had cracked nether the wagon wheels and they had all gone down into the cold water in the middle of that vast lake.

"Yous're frightening somebody, Charles," Ma said, and Pa caught Laura upwardly in his rubber, big hug.

"We're across the Mississippi!" he said, hugging her joyously. "How exercise you similar that, little one-half-pint of sweet cider half boozer up? Do you similar going out due west where Indians alive?"

Laura said she liked information technology, and she asked if they were in the Indian country now. Just they were not; they were in Minnesota.

It was a long, long way to Indian Territory. Virtually every day the horses traveled as far as they could; almost every nighttime Pa and Ma made camp in a new place. Sometimes they had to stay several days in one military camp considering a creek was in flood and they couldn't cantankerous it till the water went down. They crossed likewise many creeks to count. They saw strange woods and hills, and stranger country with no trees. They drove across rivers on long wooden bridges, and they came to one broad yellow river that had no bridge.

That was the Missouri River. Pa drove onto a raft, and they all sat all the same in the wagon while the raft went swaying abroad from the condom land and slowly crossed all that rolling muddy-yellow water.

After more days they came to hills over again. In a valley the wagon stuck fast in deep black mud. Pelting poured down and thunder crashed and lightning flared. There was no place to make camp and build a fire. Everything was clammy and chill and miserable in the wagon, just they had to stay in it and consume cold $.25 of food.

Next day Pa constitute a place on a hillside where they could army camp. The pelting had stopped, but they had to wait a week before the creek went downwards and the mud dried then that Pa could dig the railroad vehicle wheels out of it and go along.

One day, while they were waiting, a tall, lean homo came out of the woods, riding a black pony. He and Pa talked awhile, and so they went off into the woods together, and when they came dorsum, both of them were riding black ponies. Pa had traded the tired brown horses for those ponies.

They were beautiful little horses, and Pa said they were not really ponies; they were western mustangs. "They're strong as mules and gentle as kittens," Pa said. They had large, soft, gentle eyes, and long manes and tails, and slender legs and feet much smaller and quicker than the feet of horses in the Big Woods.

When Laura asked what their names were, Pa said that she and Mary could name them. Then Mary named one, Pet, and Laura named the other, Patty. When the creek's roar was not so loud and the road was drier, Pa dug the wagon out of the mud. He hitched Pet and Patty to information technology, and they all went on together.

They had come up in the covered wagon all the long way from the Big Woods of Wisconsin, across Minnesota and Iowa and Missouri. All that long way, Jack had trotted under the railroad vehicle. At present they set out to go across Kansas.

Kansas was an endless flat state covered with tall grass bravado in the wind. Day after day they traveled in Kansas, and saw nothing but the rippling grass and enormous sky. In a perfect circle the sky curved downward to the level state, and the carriage was in the circumvolve's exact middle.

All day long Pet and Patty went forward, trotting and walking and trotting again, but they couldn't go out of the middle of that circle. When the sun went downward, the circumvolve was however around them and the edge of the sky was pink. Then slowly the country became black. The current of air made a alone audio in the grass. The campsite fire was small and lost in so much infinite. But big stars hung from the sky, glittering and so near that Laura felt she could almost touch them.

Next day the state was the same, the heaven was the same, the circle did not change. Laura and Mary were tired of them all. In that location was cipher new to do and naught new to look at. The bed was made in the dorsum of the carriage and neatly covered with a gray blanket; Laura and Mary sat on it. The canvas sides of the wagon-peak were rolled up and tied, then the prairie wind blew in. It whipped Laura's straight brown hair and Mary's aureate curls every which-way, and the strong calorie-free screwed up their eyelids.

Sometimes a big jack rabbit divisional in big bounds away over the bravado grass. Jack paid no attention. Poor Jack was tired, as well, and his paws were sore from traveling so far. The wagon kept on jolting, the canvas meridian snapped in the wind. 2 faint bicycle tracks kept going away behind the wagon, ever the aforementioned.

Pa'due south dorsum was hunched. The reins were loose in his hands, the wind blew his long brown beard. Ma sat straight and serenity, her hands folded in her lap. Baby Carrie slept in a nest amidst the soft bundles.

"Ah-wow!" Mary yawned, and Laura said: "Ma, tin can't nosotros become out and run behind the wagon? My legs are so tired."

"No, Laura," Ma said.

"Aren't we going to military camp pretty before long?" Laura asked. Information technology seemed such a long time since apex, when they had eaten their dejeuner sitting on the clean grass in the shade of the wagon.

Pa answered: "Not yet. It's too early to camp now."

"I want to camp, now! I'm and then tired," Laura said.

Then Ma said, "Laura." That was all, but it meant that Laura must non mutter. And so she did not complain whatever more than out loud, just she was still naughty, inside. She sat and thought complaints to herself.

Her legs ached and the wind wouldn't stop blowing her pilus. The grass waved and the railroad vehicle jolted and zippo else happened for a long time.

"We're coming to a creek or a river," Pa said. "Girls, can you see those copse ahead?"

Laura stood up and held to ane of the wagon bows. Far ahead she saw a depression dark smudge. "That'due south trees," Pa said. "You can tell past the shape of the shadows. In this country, copse hateful water. That'southward where we'll military camp this evening."

Chapter 2

Crossing the Creek

Pet and Patty began to trot briskly, every bit if they were glad, too. Laura held tight to the wagon bow and stood up in the jolting railroad vehicle. Beyond Pa's shoulder and far across the waves of green grass she could meet the trees, and they were not like any trees she had seen earlier. They were no taller than bushes.

"Whoa!" said Pa, of a sudden. "At present which way?" he muttered to himself.

The road divided hither, and you could not tell which was the more-traveled way. Both of them were faint wheel tracks in the grass. One went toward the w, the other sloped downwardly a lilliputian, toward the south. Both soon vanished in the alpine, blowing grass.

"Better become downhill, I estimate," Pa decided. "The creek's downwards in the bottoms. Must be this is the style to the ford." He turned Pet and Patty toward the due south.

The road went downwardly and up and down and upward again, over gently curving land. The trees were nearer now, merely they were no taller. So Laura gasped and clutched the wagon bow, for almost nether Pet'due south and Patty's noses there was no more blowing grass, there was no state at all. She looked beyond the edge of the state and across the tops of trees.

The route turned there. For a little way it went forth the cliff's top, so it went sharply downward. Pa put on the brakes; Pet and Patty braced themselves backward and almost sat down. The wagon wheels slid onward, little by lilliputian lowering the wagon farther downwardly the steep slope into the ground. Jagged cliffs of blank red earth rose upwardly on both sides of the wagon. Grass waved along their tops, merely nothing grew on their seamed, straight-up-and-down sides. They were hot, and heat came from them against Laura'due south face up. The wind was still blowing overhead, but information technology did not blow downwardly into this deep crack in the basis. The stillness seemed foreign and empty.

And then once more the railroad vehicle was level. The narrow cleft down wh

ich it had come opened into the bottom lands. Here grew the alpine trees whose tops Laura had seen from the prairie to a higher place. Shady groves were scattered on the rolling meadows, and in the groves deer were lying downward, hardly to exist seen among the shadows. The deer turned their heads toward the carriage, and curious fawns stood up to encounter information technology more conspicuously.

Laura was surprised because she did not see the creek. But the bottom lands were wide. Downward here, below the prairie, there were gentle hills and open sunny places. The air was all the same and hot. Nether the wagon wheels the ground was soft. In the sunny open spaces the grass grew thin, and deer had cropped it brusk.

For a while the loftier, bare cliffs of red earth stood upward behind the carriage. Merely they were nigh hidden behind hills and trees when Pet and Patty stopped to drink from the creek.

The rushing audio of the water filled the nevertheless air. All along the creek banks the trees hung over it and made it dark with shadows. In the eye information technology ran swiftly, sparkling silvery and blue.

"This creek's pretty high," Pa said. "But I judge we can make information technology all right. You tin see this is a ford, past the one-time wheel ruts. What do you lot say, Caroline?"

"Whatsoever y'all say, Charles," Ma answered.

Pet and Patty lifted their wet noses. They pricked their ears forrard, looking at the creek; and so they pricked them backward to hear what Pa would say. They sighed and laid their soft noses together to whisper to each other. A little manner upstream, Jack was lapping the water with his red tongue.

vanwagonerthosell.blogspot.com

Source: https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/laura-ingalls-wilder/33885-little_house_on_the_prairie.html

Share this post