Little House in the Big Woods

Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 1932

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-3

Chapters 4-6

Chapters 7-9

Chapters 10-13

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 1 Summary: “Little House in the Big Woods”

In this chapter introduces four-year-old Laura Ingalls along with her family’s gray house of logs in the woods of Wisconsin. Along with all the trees, many animals live in this area, including wolves. Although Laura finds their howling scary, Jack the bulldog and her father’s gun protect her when she is sleeping next to her sister, Mary. One night her Pa, Charles Ingalls, even carries her to the window to see two of them in front of the house.

The house is described as comfortable with a crooked rail fence and two oak trees in front. Laura discovers one day that two deer have been thrown over its branches. Pa had killed them, and they eat venison that night. He hunts all day now, and when he does not hunt he works to store the meat properly for winter. He goes through the process of smoking the meat with hickory chips. He also brings home fish and works on fattening a pig they own, although one day the pig is threatened by a bear and Pa uses his gun to scare it away. The Ingallses also own a garden for vegetables.

One day Uncle Henry comes over, and he and Pa slaughter the pig. Laura puts her fingers in her ears so she won’t hear it squealing. Though her Pa assures her they kill it quickly, “[…] she did not want to hear him squeal” (Page 13). The adults let the hog cool, salt it, and cure it, and the girls play with the bladder and eat the tail. They also help with the lard-making and watch while their Ma makes headcheese and sausage.

As it gets colder, Mary and Laura turn to playing in the attic among the hams. Mary has a doll; Laura only has a corncob wrapped in a handkerchief. At night Pa brings in his traps to grease them by the fire while telling his daughters jokes and stories; he then plays them the fiddle. One night, watching the cat Black Susan come in through the cat door, Pa tells them a story about a man with a big cat and a little cat. He made a cat-hole in the door for the big cat, then one smaller one for the little cat. Mary wonders why, and Laura interrupts with a theory that the big cat wouldn’t let the small cat use the larger door. Pa admonishes her for interrupting, then says, “’But I see,’ he said, ‘that either one of you has more sense than the man who cut the two holes in his door.’” (Page 23).

Chapter 2 Summary: “Winter Days and Winter Nights”

The first snow arrives. Pa spends his days setting traps. One day, he shoots a bear and the pig it was trying to eat, and the meat easily freezes in the bitter cold. Mary and Laura help Ma with the work: washing dishes, airing and making beds. Each day has different duties. Laura likes churning butter and baking; the process of churning and molding butter is described here in detail. After the work is done, Ma makes paper dolls for her daughters.

When Pa comes home each day, he calls to Laura: “Where is my little half-pint of cider half drunk up?” (Page 34). He brings in wood, and if he’s early that day because the traps are empty or he got the game early, he has time to play. Once they play a game called “mad dog” where he chases them around and growls so fiercely that Laura screams and drags Mary over the wood-box, leading Pa to remark on her strength. Ma tells him he’s scaring them, so he takes his fiddle down and plays “Yankee Doodle Dandy.”

Her father tells stories. One night while looking at the cat, he tells “The Story of Grandpa and the Panther.” He says that the girls’ grandpa heard a panther scream one night while he was coming home. He and his horse ran fast but could not get away from the panther. As they arrived home, Grandpa jumped off the horse into the house just as the panther was springing. The horse ran off with the panther on its back, but Grandpa got his gun from the wall and shot the panther dead.

The girls, snug and cozy in their home, are not afraid of the wolf and wind howls they hear outside.

Chapter 3 Summary: “The Long Rifle”

Every evening, the girls help their father and watch him make bullets. The hot bullets shine so much the girls burn their fingers touching them, but they say nothing because they know it’s their own fault they had not minded Charles when he said to stay away. They also watch him clean his gun, then help him load it with gunpowder and bullets. It is stored over a door and always loaded, just in case.

Then it is storytime again. This time, their Pa tells “The Story of Pa and the Voice in the Woods,” a clear favorite with his girls. He says that when he was nine his job was to drive the cows home without playing on the way since after dark predators were out and about. One day he left slightly early and thought he didn’t need to hurry; he eventually forgot his duty while pretending he was a mighty hunter. As it got dark he remembered his task, but couldn’t find the cows. He did not dare go home without them, so he searched and called, getting scared of his own noises and a “Who?” sound. So he ran home. Something grabbed his foot and he fell, then got up and ran again. At home, he discovered the cows already there and finds that his toenail has been ripped off—he didn’t feel it in his panic. His father got a switch and thrashed him for disobeying, saying that he will come to no harm if he listens and will also avoid being scared by screech owls in the future.

Chapters 1-3 Analysis

Although Little House in the Big Woods is a book of fiction, it loosely chronicles the real life of author Laura Ingalls Wilder, who was born at the location in the book—Pepin, Wisconsin—in 1867. When she was two, her family moved to the Indian territory that is now Kansas, not far from what would become the city of Independence. However, reportedly because this was in Osage territory and because their Wisconsin house’s buyer hadn’t paid the mortgage, they moved back to Pepin in 1871. That is the setting and time of this story.

Wilder’s daughter, writer Rose Wilder Lane, encouraged her mother to write down her story, and her connections in the publishing industry helped Wilder get Little House in the Big Woods published by Harper & Brothers in 1932. The two closely collaborated on the stories, and in fact, there has been some controversy over how much of the writing belongs to Lane rather than her mother. Also, two of Lane’s most successful books, Let the Hurricane Roar (1932) and Freeland (1938) are adult versions of Wilder’s story.

For many children and adults, Wilder’s story defines the pioneer lifestyle. Taken together, the nine books in the series outline the coming-of-age story of a young pioneer woman in America. This lifestyle was brought more spectacularly to the public eye by Lane’s “adopted grandson,” Roger MacBride, who inherited Lane’s rights to the “Little House” franchise and co-produced the 1970s-80s television show.

The first three chapters of the narrative open by introducing Laura with the line, “Once upon a time, sixty years ago, a little girl lived in the Big Woods of Wisconsin, in a little gray house made of logs” (Page 10). The story begins by jumping into one of its themes: nature and the natural world. The wilderness is rife with wildlife, invoking both a sense of fear and awe in the Ingallses. However, another theme is readily apparent immediately, that of comfort and security; the third person narrator notes: “But she was safe inside the solid log walls” (Page 3). Author Wilder describes her home as “a comfortable house. Upstairs there was a large attic, pleasant to play in with the rain drummed on the roof” (Page 4) and adds that there’s a fence around the property “to keep the bears and the deer away” (Page 4). In both these early passages she emphasizes the girl’s feelings of security. Many things that happen to the girls in these chapters provide sources of excitement within their safe existence, including making patterns on the frost in the glass windows.

Readers are also quickly introduced to the tenor of family life in the Big Woods, which includes daily chores such as cutting down trees, gardening, hunting, storing food, preparing the hides and meat of animals, and protecting their own animals from predators. It also includes work in the more domestic sphere of their mother, such as washing, mending, and baking. All of these tasks are described in a loving way that focuses on their utility to the family and how this lifestyle provides not just sustenance, but treats and happy times for the Ingalls family. “After that, Butchering Time was great fun” (Page 13), Laura notes about a busy, active day in which a pig is killed. Though the slaughter is difficult for Laura, the family gains much from the pig, including the winter store of hams and sausages the pig’s blown-up bladder the girls play with like a balloon. Tasks also include making bullets and maintaining a gun, which are both necessary to protect the family from wild animals; here, the gun is an implement that helps keep the family safe. This family seems to live more or less harmoniously within their untamed environment, even with dangers ever-present.

The Ingallses’ family time includes play for the girls, of course, but also stories and songs from Pa. These stories not only provide entertainment for this isolated family but provide moral and survival lessons for the girls. These include tales of wild animals and versions of the American song “Yankee Doodle.” In one story, Pa combines a fear of wild animals with a certain naughtiness he engaged in as a boy, the moral of which went: “If you’d obeyed me, as you should, then you wouldn’t have been out in the Big Woods after dark, and you wouldn’t have been scared by a screech-owl” (Page 58).