Little House on the Prairie

Pa digs the family a well with the help of another neighbor, Mr. Scott. Mr. Scott is boisterous and carefree. He makes fun of Pa for always sending a candle down into the well hole before going in himself, a process that checks for dangerous underground gases. If the candle goes out, it means that gases are present. Mr. Scott thinks it’s unnecessary, and one morning, Pa lowers Mr. Scott into the hole without checking with a candle first, thinking that the other had already done it. There are gases in the hole, and Mr. Scott faints, so Pa goes in after him and gets him out. Both men recover, but Mr. Scott stops ridiculing the candle check. Pa pushes the gases out of the well hole with a homemade explosive made from gunpowder.

The men eventually dig deep enough to reach water, though Pa almost gets stuck in quicksand at the end of the digging. The hole is deep enough to reach underground water and fills up to the top. Pa builds a wooden cover over the well so the girls are safe from accidentally falling in, and Laura delights in “the clear and cold and good” water (160) that the family now has available on demand, rather than the “stale, warm” (161) water Pa had been hauling from the creek.

A herd of Texas Longhorn cattle comes near the family’s house, as cowboys are driving them north to Fort Dodge, Iowa. Two of the cowboys come to the house and ask Pa for his help keeping the cattle from wandering into the creek bottoms while they cross the creek in exchange for some beef. Laura is fascinated by the cowboys, and her description of them implies that they may be Latino vaqueros from Texas: “They were red-brown as Indians, but their eyes were narrow slits between squinting eyelids” (165). While the herds are close, Laura can hear the cowboys whooping and yelling as they work and is enthralled with the excitement and energy of the cattle drive. Pa helps the cowboys for two days and comes home on the second day, not just with beef, but with a cow and her calf that the cowboys don’t want to take because they’re not marketable. The family is excited to have milk and butter again.

Spring turns to summer on the prairie, and the weather becomes hot and still. Pa says that the Indigenous people have deserted one of their camps near the house, and he takes Laura and Mary to go see it. They walk what seems to Laura to be a long way on the prairie, although when they reach the camp, they can still see their house on the horizon. The camp is down in a little hollow below the rest of the prairie, and Pa shows Laura and Mary the different tracks in the sand of the hollow. Laura and Mary discover colorful beads scattered in the soil and search for them for hours. As the sun is starting to set, they start back to the house, and Laura is afraid because Pa doesn’t have his gun to protect them. He picks her up and carries her, “big girl that she was” (178) and she is comforted.

At home, Mary offers to make her beads from the camp into a necklace for Carrie, and Laura feels pressured into doing the same by Ma, “who waited to hear what Laura would say” and then says, “That’s my unselfish, good little girls” (179). Laura resents giving her beads up, although she feels better when she realizes that Mary didn’t have enough beads on her own to make a full necklace for Carrie, and that both of them needed to combine their beads to make it big enough. However, she is angry at Mary for being “better” than her and remains “naughty enough to want her beads for herself” (181).