Mrs. Wilder's saga of our pioneers, eventually to be in seven volumes, is a true story of every aspect of the American frontier, for children. In the first three books issued we have seen the forests, and the Indians, hunters and trappers, and ground has been laid for the coming of the farmers to the great plains.

In this, the fourth book, the family leaves their home in Indian Territory and travels by covered wagon across Kansas, Missouri, Iowa, to Minnesota where they purchase land and settle down beside Plum Creek. Pa plants wheat, and Ma makes the best of living in a dug-out until Pa builds right before the ecstatic eyes of little Laura and Mary a wonderful house of clean sweet-smelling lumber, a clean airy lovely home, with boughten window-panes and hinges.

Laura and Mary play in Plum Creek, slide down the golden straw-stack, walk barefoot to school wearing fresh sunbonnets and carrying schoolbooks Ma used when she was little. They catch fish in the creek, and help Ma and P with the chores. And then the grasshoppers come, just as the wheat is about to be harvested. It rains grasshoppers into Plum Creck, onto the wheat field, all over the land, and the grasshoppers eat the wheat.

How the little family takes care of the farm while Pa walks two hundred miles east to get a job harvesting to earn some money, how Pa returns with money to pay their debts, and how for three days and three nights before Christmas he is lost in a raging blizzard is told by the woman who sixty years ago was the Laura of this story.

This is a real and beautiful telling of a way of life our children will know only through a story such as this. Young readers will live these days by Plum Creek with Laura and Mary. Writing simply and truthfully Mrs. Wilder creates for us the warm golden fields, the sky, Plum Creek and its willows, the bare clean schoolhouse where the wind came in, and the sound of waving grasses, and the smell and the sight of the endless prairies and the great light of the sky.

From the dust jacket