Charles and Caroline Ingalls and their daughters Mary, Laura, Carrie, and Grace lived on this homestead site after spending the fall and winter of 1879-80 at a railway construction camp by the shores of Silver Lake and then briefly living in the Ingalls Store Building in the townsite of De Smet, a mile west. They then moved to a claim shanty on this site across the Big Slough from the town, where Pa planted the cottonwoods that still stand and Ma made a home for the family. After the October Blizzard, they returned to town to spend the long winter of 1880-81. Laura Ingalls Wilder later drew on these experiences in four books of her Little House series about the pioneering of the Ingalls and Wilder families, including By the Shores of Silver Lake, Little Town on the Prairie, The Long Winter, and These Happy Golden Years. One of the schools Laura was to teach was a mile south of this site. In These Happy Golden Years, she told of her romance and marriage to Almanzo Wilder and of their life in a claim shanty two miles north of De Smet, where their daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, was born. Laura Ingalls Wilder died on February 11, 1957, at age 90 at the farm in the Ozarks near Mansfield, Missouri, where she and Almanzo had lived since 1894.