76 pages • 2 hours read
Laura Ingalls WilderLittle House on the Prairie
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 1932A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 5-10
Chapter 5 Summary: “The House on the Prairie”
The Ingallses continue in their wagon for a few hours the next day until Pa finds a good spot to build a house. They are approximately 40 miles from the town of Independence, Kansas, with the Verdigris River—a tributary to the Arkansas River that flows south from Kansas to Oklahoma—on the eastern horizon of their house site. The site is also just south of a creek, ensuring that the family will have easy access to water.
The family unpacks their wagon and disassembles it so that Pa can use the base to cut and haul logs from the creek bottom for their house. One of the first days he starts working on the house, Pa has Ma help him lift logs, and one falls on Ma’s ankle, spraining it badly. Pa builds skids to help him lift logs by himself.
One day, Pa comes back to camp saying that the family has a bachelor neighbor two miles away named Mr. Edwards. Mr. Edwards and Pa agree to help each other build houses, since Mr. Edwards needs one, too. Mr. Edwards comes and helps Pa for a day, and the two men finish building the walls of the Ingalls house. Mr. Edwards stays for dinner, and Ma makes an especially nice meal using harder-to-find ingredients, like store-bought sugar rather than molasses. That evening, Pa plays the fiddle while the family listens, and Mr. Edwards dances to the music before leaving for his own camp. After he’s gone, the family hears a nightingale singing down by the creek, and Pa plays the song back to the bird, who answers him several times.
Chapter 6 Summary: “Moving In”
Pa puts the canvas wagon cover over the skeleton roof of the house, and the family moves in after Laura and Mary help Ma gather up and remove the wood chips from the house’s construction. Ma arranges the house and does laundry. Pa hasn’t built a door for the house yet, so they hang a quilt over the doorway temporarily.
In the evening, Laura, Mary, and Carrie go to bed in the new house. Laura is awake for a while watching the full moon shining through one of the window holes. Ma and Pa go outside to look at the moon, too. Laura hears a wolf howling out on the prairie but “only felt a little shiver […] up her backbone” (79) because she feels safer in the house than out on the open prairie.
Chapter 7 Summary: “The Wolf-Pack”
The family continues to settle into their new home. Pa and Mr. Edwards build Pet and Patty a stable, and the next morning Pa discovers that Pet was pregnant and had a foal in the night. Laura and Mary name the foal, a male, Bunny because of his long, upright ears. Pet is too protective to let anyone come near Bunny except Pa.
Pa leaves to ride Patty across the prairie to scout out the landscape and get a feel for the area. He finds two bachelor settlers living together in a cabin, and a family of seven camped in a creek bottom near the bachelors’ house. The family is sick with “fever n’ague,” the settlers’ name for malaria, from the mosquitos in the creek bottom. Pa goes back to the bachelors and tells them about the family, and one of them goes to help the family recover and move their camp to higher ground.
On the way home, Pa encounters a pack of 50 wolves, which surround and trot after him for a while. Pa doesn’t have his gun and knows that it wouldn’t be enough to fend off all 50 anyway, so he keeps Patty at a walk to keep the wolves calm and prevent them from chasing after his horse. He and Patty are nervous, but the wolves eventually leave them. Patty races back to the house, and Pa tells the family his harrowing story.
That night, the wolves surround the little house in a circle, howling. Pa stands guard with his gun and Jack, and the wolves eventually leave. Laura gets up briefly, and Pa lifts her up to look at them through the window. She eventually goes back to sleep, even though the wolves are so close she can hear them snuffling in the cracks of the log cabin’s walls.
Chapter 8 Summary: “Two Stout Doors”
Laura helps Pa build a door for the cabin. He doesn’t have any nails left but builds the door with oak wood, wooden pegs, and leather straps for the hinges and latch. Laura feels much safer when the door is up. Pa also builds a door for the stable to keep Pet, Patty, and Bunny secure, rather than the makeshift door of planks he had built before.
Chapter 9 Summary: “A Fire on the Hearth”
Pa builds a stone fireplace in the house for Ma to use for cooking. He has to go down to the creek bottom to get the stones, and Laura and Mary go with him on his first trip. They play on the bank until Pa says they can wade in the creek a little bit. Mary tires of wading and goes back to sit on the bank, but Laura stays in and tries to catch the little minnows in the water. The girls go back to the house with Pa when he’s finished, and he builds the fireplace over the course of the day.
Ma makes the family a dinner of roasted prairie chicken that night in the new fireplace, and they eat inside their house for the first time. Pa has constructed a makeshift table and chairs. Laura feels even more safe and secure as the house begins to come together.
Chapter 10 Summary: “A Roof and a Floor”
The chapter describes a bit of Laura and Mary’s daily routine. They have a few chores at the house, like sweeping the floor and making the beds. Then, they play on the prairie, observing the animals around them like snakes, prairie chickens, and rabbits. They also share the responsibility of watching their baby sister, Carrie, while Ma does other tasks around the house.
Pa builds a roof and a wooden floor for the house, using nails from Mr. Edwards. The house becomes even more secure and complete.
Chapters 5-10 Analysis
These chapters show both the family getting settled on their land and their introductions to the other settlers in the area. These interactions show the nineteenth-century settler value of hospitality, as Ma makes finer food during Mr. Edwards’s visit. Mr. Edwards and Pa also agree to trade labor with each other on their property as a sign of good-will Later in the book, Mr. Edwards and the Scotts will also exhibit generosity toward the family, a fact that emphasizes how important it was to the Ingalls and other settlers to have a sense of community with one another. The family also begins to experience more security, exemplified by the improvements Pa makes to the house to provide more amenities and protection from the elements and wildlife, though this security is often disrupted by mishaps or anxiety about Native Americans.
Other important values demonstrated in these chapters are self-sufficiency and independence. Ma doesn’t want to be “beholden” to Mr. Edwards when he loans the family nails in Chapter 10, to which Pa replies, “Nor I…I’ve never been beholden to any man yet, and I never will be. But neighborliness is another matter, and I’ll pay him back…as soon as I can make the trip to Independence” (124-125). Neighborliness, then, is an acceptable, even desirable, relationship on the frontier, characterized by a fair exchange of labor or goods. Neighborliness also seems to be carried out by private citizens rather than a more bureaucratic governmental relationship, as demonstrated when the bachelor neighbors help the sick family. The lack of services in any official capacity brings out this quality, and indeed the settlers deliberately seek out this type of relationship. The town’s name of Independence further suggests that freedom is important to the white settlers.
Despite the Ingalls’s growing security, threats remain on the prairie, as demonstrated in these chapters by the settler family’s fever—a foreshadowing of the Ingalls’s own fever later in the book—and wolves, which, although harmless, in these chapters are a danger to people and livestock alike. Not only were these threats very real to nineteenth-century settlers, but they subtly contribute to an underlying sense of instability in the Ingalls’s life in Kansas. This instability is ultimately confirmed when the family learns that they must leave their would-be farm at the end of the book.
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