While Laura Ingalls grows up in a little house on the western prairie, Almanzo Wilder is living on a big farm in New York State. Almanzo and his brother and sisters help with the summer planting and fall harvest. In winter there is wood to be chopped and great slabs of ice to be cut from the river and stored. Almanzo wishes for just one thing--his very own horse--but he must prove that he is ready for such a big responsibility.

Ma and the girls follow Pa west by train where they make their home at a rough railroad camp and plan for their own homestead.

After an October blizzard, Laura's family moves from the claim shanty into town for the winter, a winter that an Indian has predicted will be seven months of bad weather. Newbery honor book: 1941.

Fifteen-year-old Laura learns that living away from home and teaching school can be a bit frightening when most of the students are taller than she is, but every week Almanzo Wilder arrives to take her to her family for the weekend.

A young pioneer girl and her family attend a wintertime party at her grandparents' house in the Big Woods of Wisconsin.

A pioneer father tells his two small daughters why he was unable to shoot a deer for their dinner.