In February 1874, the Ingallses headed west in their wagon across the frozen Mississippi River into Minnesota. It would be repaid with disaster and heartbreak. Whatever the motivation, selling a comfortable, established home with plowed fields and a productive garden was a leap into the unknown. Charles Ingalls never seemed to realize that his ambition for a profitable farm was irreconcilable with a love of untrammeled and unpopulated wilderness. Years later, Laura Ingalls Wilder would attribute the decision to the disappearance of game and her father’s distaste for the crowds piling into Wisconsin, where the population had swelled to more than a million. Perhaps they were struggling to pay back debts perhaps it was simply an offer too good to refuse. In the fall of 1873, Charles and Caroline Ingalls sold their little house in the Big Woods of Wisconsin, the log cabin where their two oldest daughters had been born, for a thousand dollars.
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