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Title |
Author |
Grade
level |
"By
the Shores of Silver Lake" |
Laura Ingalls Wilder |
Grade 3 to 5th |
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Genre: |
Fiction, chapter book, Historical
fiction |
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Summary of the story : |
By the Shores of Silver Lake is
based on Laura's late childhood spent near De
Smet, South Dakota, beginning in 1879. The book also
introduces Laura's youngest sister Grace
Pearl. Sadly, in the beginning their beloved dog Jack
dies of old age. Laura meets her cousin Lena Waldvogel who
becomes her good friend (Lena was the daughter of Laura’s
Aunt Docia, who married August Waldvogel). Because her
sister Mary is blind due to an illness, Laura also acts as
Mary’s eyes and becomes kinder and more mature through this
service. When they first move to the railroad camp, the
Ingalls stay in a railroad shanty, and the following spring
they are able to stake a claim of their own. Also her father
gets offered a job in the west by his sister.
Moving
to Dakota territory
By the Shores of Silver Lake begins
when the family is about to leave Plum Creek, shortly after
the family has recovered from the scarlet fever which caused
Mary to become blind. The family welcomes a visit from Aunt
Docia, whom they had not seen for several years. She
suggests that Pa and Ma move out west to Dakota Territory,
where Pa would work in Uncle Henry’s railroad camp. Ma and
Pa agree, because then Pa can look for a homestead while he
works. Since Mary is too weak to travel, Pa goes ahead with
the wagon and team, and the rest of the family follows later
by train. The day Pa leaves, however, their beloved bulldog
Jack is found dead, which saddens Laura greatly. (The dog
upon whom Jack was based was no longer with the family at
that point, but the author inserted his death here to serve
as a transition between her childhood and her adolescence.)
The family travels to Dakota Territory by train—this is the
children's first train trip and they are excited by the
novelty of this new-fangled mode of transportation. In an
hour they cover the distance it would take a horse and wagon
a day to cover. Upon arrival, they go to the hotel to eat
and await Pa.
Life in the railroad camp
Pa shows up within the hour, and they leave for the railroad
camp. There, Laura meets her cousin Lena, and she and Laura
bunk together for the time that the Ingalls family spends
with them. Laura and Lena play together when they are done
with their chores, which range from collecting laundry
cleaned by a neighbor to milking cows; Laura rides Lena's
pony, the first time she has ever ridden a horse.
Winter approaches, and the railroad workers take down the
cabins for transport and go back East. Pa had found a piece
of land on which he wanted to stake his claim in the spring,
and as a result he wishes to remain behind in order to file
a claim on the land as soon as the land office opens again
in spring. Fortunately, the surveyors, who had planned to
stay in their home all winter, are called back East also and
ask the Ingalls to remain in their house in exchange for
keeping watch over their surveying equipment
[
A new claim, a new house
So the family moves, and Laura feels that no
one could be as excited as she to be moving into a beautiful
house. Winter comes, and one night when Pa is playing the
fiddle, Mr. and Mrs. Boast arrive in the middle of a
snowstorm; they are migrating West but were caught by the
bad weather. They stay past Christmas, and at New Years the
Ingalls travel to the Boast’s for dinner. To pass time, Mrs
Boast shares her collection of newspapers with Laura and
shows the Ingalls family how to make a what-not.[1] Soon
afterward Pa goes to file his claim, but two men want the
same piece. Mr. Edwards (an old friend of the Ingalls) holds
them back while Mr. Ingalls files his claim.
While Pa is gone, people emigrating west stop at the
surveyors' house on their way to their eventual claims. Ma
charges money for the service, and in the end has a little
over $42. This money is later used to help send Mary to the
college for the blind in Iowa. Pa uses leftover lumber from
the railroad to build a house in the new town, because the
surveyors are returning and will need the house in which the
Ingalls have been living. Though Pa has been awarded his own
claim, he needs time to build a house on it, so the family
stays in the house in town until the claim shanty is
finished, and during the harsh winters when it is too cold
to remain in an un-insulated shanty.
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Possible Design Challenges: |
-
Build a
house on the prairie
-
design a
tool to make it easier to get things on and off a wagon
-
Design a song recording device for this time period
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Comments: |
Laura Ingalls Wilder lived
the events described in her Little
House books.
As a young girl, she traveled with her parents and her older
sister, Mary, in a covered wagon across Minnesota, Iowa, and
Kansas, and into Indian Territory, where they lived in the
Little House on the Prairie. Then the family traveled back
to western Minnesota and lived on the banks of Plum Creek.
Finally, they went west again and settled on the shores of
Silver Lake in Dakota Territory.
Historical background
To encourage settlement of the mid-west part of the United
States, Congress passed the Homestead
Act in 1862.
This act divided unsettled land into sections, and heads of
households could file a claim for very little money. A
section was 1-square-mile (2.6 km2),
and a claim was ¼ of a section. 36 sections made a township.
A section was identified by three numbers, for example NW
quarter of Section 18, Township 109, Range 38. By paying
$10.00 plus other filing fees, a man could get 160 acres
(0.65 km2) of land for
his use if he could live on it for 5 years and not give up
to go back east. The Ingalls’ staked one claim near Plum
Creek. In the spring of 1880, Charles Ingalls filed a
homestead claim south of De Smet for the NE quarter of
Section 3, Township 110, Range 56.[2]
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