The West Begins

August 13, 2025

By Pamela Smith Hill

By The Shores of Silver Lake, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s fifth Little House novel, is a pivotal book in the series. Not only does Wilder shift audiences in this book—from middle grade readers to young adults—she moves the fictional Ingalls family to Dakota Territory, where in her words, “The West Begins” (1).

We now think of the Dakotas as part of the Upper Midwest, but in 1879, when the real Charles Ingalls and family moved west from Minnesota, Dakota Territory was the West. Wilder retained this geographic definition when she wrote her fictional Little House books in the 1930s and early 1940s. In a chapter entitled “The West Begins,” Pa observes, “This is a different country. I can’t tell you how exactly, but this prairie is different. Feels different” (60).

The fictional Laura Ingalls agrees, but senses something deeper, more profound, even ominous in this different West: “an enormous stillness that made you feel still. And when you were still, you could feel great stillness coming closer” (3). For Laura, Dakota Territory is a vast, wild, and “changeless place that would not even know” she “was there” (4).

Yet, even before the fictional family arrives, the West of By The Shores of Silver Lake has already experienced significant changes. Pa tells Laura that she’ll never see a buffalo in the West because “white men had slaughtered them,” and in an especially lyrical scene, Wilder writes a kind of literary tribute to the indigenous people her fictional family has displaced. As a Native American man—Big Jerry—rides his pony west toward the setting sun, Laura feels the moment is transcendent, that “Somehow that moment when the beautiful, free pony and the wild man rode into the sun would last forever” (5).

As the rest of the novel unfolds, the West undergoes one transformation after another. Big Jerry returns, and like Pa, is swept up in the drama of building a railroad across the prairie. Laura watches as the landscape itself is transformed, dust blowing “from the plows and scrapers” as they slice through the sod. She imagines that “someday the long steel tracks would lie level on the fills and through the cuts, and trains would come roaring, steaming and smoking with speed” (6).

By the end of the book, the last buffalo wolves have left Dakota Territory, replaced by swarms of people moving west. “Yellow skeletons of buildings” rise along a new Main Street, creating a new town “from the muddy ground along the railroad grade” (7).

In the closing pages of By The Shores of Silver Lake, Laura stands outside the family’s claim shanty, looking off toward the twinkling lights from the new town. But it’s the “whole great plain of the earth” that speaks to Laura. “Lonely and wild and eternal were land and water and sky…. The buffalo are gone,” she thinks. “And now we’re homesteaders” (8).

Laura and the West are on parallel paths. Will civilization tame the West? Will approaching womanhood tame Laura Ingalls? The next three books in the series answer those questions.

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