On a low hill immediately west of this spot stood the homestead claim shanty of Almanzo and Laura Ingalls Wilder. Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867-1957) became known around the world as the author of the "Little House" books, a series of autobiographical accounts of pioneering by the Ingalls and Wilder families, and six of those books are set in the De Smet area. The First Four Years recounts farm life at this location from 1885-1889. A shanty on the hilltop was the birthplace of the Wilders' only surviving child, Rose Wilder Lane (1886-1968), who later became a well-known novelist, journalist, and political essayist. Two of her 1930's novels, Free Land and Let The Hurricane Roar, portray South Dakota pioneering, and she also wrote biographies, translated books, and served as a foreign correspondent. Her last reporting assignment took her to Viet Nam in 1965, when at 78 she was America's oldest war correspondent. Although her career included travels around the world, she said that the immense prairie skies, acres of waving grain, and struggling saplings of her Dakota childhood formed the entire pattern of her life. One and one half miles north lies another quarter section that was Laura and Almanzo Wilder's tree claim, where they also lived during their early married life and endured a fire that destroyed their home, the death of an infant son, and other natural disasters that were part of daily life for South Dakota pioneers. As Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote, "No one who has not pioneered can understand the fascination and the terror of it."