These Happy Golden Years
written by Laura Ingalls Wilder
part of Little House

Farmer Boy is based on the childhood of Laura's husband, Almanzo Wilder, who grew up in the 1860's near the town of Burke in upstate New York. The book covers one year in Almanzo's life, beginning just before his ninth birthday, and describes in detail the endless chores involved in running the Wilder family farm. Young as he is, Almanzo rises before five a.m. every day to milk several cows and feed stock. In the growing season, he plants and tends crops; in winter, he hauls logs, helps fill the ice house, trains a team of young oxen, and sometimes - when his father can spare him - goes to school. The novel includes stories of Almanzo's brother Royal and his sisters Eliza Jane and Alice.

At the beginning of this story, Pa Ingalls decides to sell the house in the Big Woods of Wisconsin, and move to the Indian Territory near Independence, Kansas, as there were widely circulating stories that the land would be opened to settlement by homesteaders imminently. So Laura, along with Pa and Ma, and Mary and baby Carrie, move to Kansas. Along the way, Pa trades his two horses for two Western mustangs, which Laura and Mary name Pet and Patty. When the family reaches Indian Territory, they meet Mr. Edwards, who is extremely polite to Ma, but tells Laura and Mary that he is "a wildcat from Tennessee." Mr. Edwards is an excellent neighbor, and helps the Ingalls in every way he can, beginning with helping Pa erect their house. Then, Pa builds a roof and a floor for their house, digs a well, and the family is finally settled. During the book, the Ingalls family becomes terribly ill from a disease which was later identified to be malaria. Mrs. Scott, another neighbor, takes care of the family while they are sick. Mr. Edwards brings Laura and Mary their Christmas presents from Independence, and in the spring, the Ingalls plant the beginnings of a small farm. At the end of this book, the family is told that the land must be vacated by settlers as it is not legally open to settlement yet, and Pa elects to leave the land and move before the Army forcibly requires him to abandon the land.

The Ingalls family moves from Kansas to Minnesota and settle in a dugout "on the banks of Plum Creek" as in the book's title. Pa trades his horses Pet and Patty to the property owner for the land and crops, but later gets two new horses as Christmas presents for the family, which Laura and her sister Mary name "Sam" and "David". Pa soon builds a new above ground wooden house for the family. The house is near a town called Walnut Grove. During this story, Laura and Mary go to school for the first time where they meet their teacher, Miss Eva Beadle. They also meet Nellie Oleson, who makes fun of Laura and Mary for being "country girls". Laura plays with her bulldog Jack when she is home, and she and Mary are invited to a party at the Oleson's home. Laura and Mary invite all the girls to a party at their house to reciprocate. The family soon goes through hard times when a plague of Rocky Mountain Locusts decimate their crops. The book ends with Laura's Pa returning safely to the house after being unaccounted for during a severe four day blizzard. Laura is portrayed in this book as being seven to nine years old.

This book is based on Laura's late childhood spent near De Smet, South Dakota, in late 19th Century, and is the first book in the series to reference her sister Mary's teenage illness (referred to in the book as scarlet fever) and resulting lifelong blindness. The book also introduces Laura's youngest sister Grace Pearl. Jack dies of old age. Laura also meets her cousin Lena Waldvogel who becomes her good friend.

The story begins in Dakota Territory on a hot August day in 1880 as Laura and her father ("Pa") are haying. Pa tells Laura that he knows the winter is going to be hard because muskrats always build a house with thick walls before a hard winter, and this year, they have built the thickest walls he has ever seen. In mid-October, the Ingallses wake with an unusually early blizzard howling around their poorly insulated claim shanty. Soon afterward, Pa receives another warning from an unexpected source: a dignified old Native American man comes to the general store in town to warn the white settlers that there will be seven months of blizzards. Impressed, Pa decides to move the family into town for the winter. Laura attends school with her younger sister, Carrie until the weather becomes too severe to permit them to walk to and from the school building. Blizzard after blizzard sweeps through the town over the next few months. Provisions begin to run low, as the townspeople had been depending on the trains to bring them supplies, but the frequent blizzards prevent the trains from getting through. Eventually, the railroad company suspends all efforts to dig out the train, stranding the town. For weeks, the Ingalls subsist on potatoes and coarse brown bread, using twisted hay for fuel. As even this meager food runs out, Laura's future husband Almanzo Wilder and his friend Cap Garland risk their lives to bring wheat to the starving townspeople- enough to last the rest of the winter. As predicted, the blizzards continue for seven months. Finally, the trains begin running again, bringing the Ingalls a Christmas barrel full of good things- including a turkey, still frozen. In the last chapter, they sit down to enjoy their Christmas dinner in May.

The book begins with the spring after the Long Winter, and ends as Laura becomes a schoolteacher so she can help her sister, Mary, stay at the school for the blind in Vinton, Iowa. Laura takes a job in town sewing shirts to help earn money for Mary's college education. She hates the work but never complains, and earns $1.50 per week for a total of $9.00 before the spring rush ends. The family gets a setting of chicks from their friends, Mr. and Mrs. Boast, and things are looking up. Pa plants a corn crop for cash, which is growing beautifully until blackbirds decimate the crops. The family eats the blackbirds that Pa shoots, but it's impossible to kill them all and they lose the crop. Laura thinks that Mary won't be able to go to college that year, but Pa sells a heifer and he and Ma bring Mary to college. While Ma and Pa leave to take Mary to college, they leave Laura in charge of the house. She finds it hard to cope, especially because to distract herself and her younger sisters from their sorrow of Mary's departure, they decide to do all the fall housecleaning. It's a grueling week but they finish in time. The family moves to town for the winter, to protect themselves in case the area has another hard winter. Laura and Carrie attend school in town and Laura is reunited with her friends Minnie Johnson and Mary Power, and meets a new girl, Ida Brown. Nellie Oleson, Laura's nemesis from Plum Creek, has moved to De Smet and is attending the school. Nellie turns the teacher, Eliza Wilder, against Laura and Miss Wilder loses control of the school for a time. The winter is a "whirl of gaiety" with literary society meetings, parties and church socials. Laura find she is depressed, missing Mary and not wanting to study. She neglects her school work for a period of several months but spends the entire summer back on the claim, studying hard. By the next winter, she finds herself escorted home several nights in a row from church meetings and a school exhibition by the older Almanzo Wilder. On Christmas Eve, a surprise visit from the superintendent leaves her with a teaching certificate and a job 12 miles south of town.

These Happy Golden Years spans the time period from 1882 to 1885, when Laura marries Almanzo.

On the Way Home - an original diary of Laura Ingalls Wilder from a trip that she had in 1894 with her husband Almanzo Wilder and a seven-year old daughter Rose from their home in De Smet, South Dakota to Mansfield, Missouri where they settled for good It contains detailed description, day by day of the trip, with the commentary by her daughter Rose. The book was published for the first time in 1962, after Laura's death.

The First Four Years derives its title from a promise Laura made to Almanzo when they became engaged. Laura did not want to be a farm wife, but she consented to try farming for three years. At the end of that time, Laura and Almanzo mutually agreed to continue for one more year, a "year of grace", in Laura's words. The book ends at the close of that fourth year, on a rather optimistic note. In reality, the continually hot, dry Dakota summers, and several other tragic events they sustained eventually drove them from their land, but they later founded a very successful fruit and dairy farm in Missouri, where they lived comfortably until their respective deaths.

West From Home is the very last original "Little House" book. It consists of Laura's letters to Almanzo during her visit to their daughter Rose in San Francisco in the year of 1915