The Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest’s Hidden Lakes Trail in Wisconsin.
Where did Laura’s Big Woods go? That is the question I am currently exploring. In her memoir, Pioneer Girl, Wilder wrote that the woods “went on and on into the north,” (Brandt 14). Today, those woods are not quite so big.
I grew up in Wisconsin, and going “up ‘nort’” meant traveling to a cabin or a tent on the shore of a lake surrounded by what was left of the Big Woods of Wilder’s memory. I remember one trip when, staring out of my parents’ station wagon windows, I watched as we passed an extra-long truck on the highway. When I asked what kind of truck had passed us, my parents said it was a logging truck used to haul the cut timber from the north and was probably headed to one of the paper mills in Wausau or Stevens Point. “Your great-grandparents worked in a logging camp as camp cooks, you know,” my mom told me. At the time, I imagined the cook camp to be like a Paul Bunyan’s Cook Shanty restaurant, with all-you-can-eat powdered doughnuts and huge stacks of pancakes.
A group of men transporting logs across the snow-covered ground on a sled near Rice Lake, Wisconsin, circa 1872. Wisconsin Historical Society
As my interest in history and the history of my family matured, family members showed me the letters and photographs of my great-grandparents from the logging camp. Written in a mix of Dutch and English, the letters talked about longing for home. The timber that drew hundreds into the woods, including my great-grandparents, was the Big Woods of Wilder’s childhood. The lumber was used in dozens of paper products and building materials across the nation. Timber floated down swollen rivers to Chicago, where it was shipped east on the Great Lakes by boat or by railroads that took it in all four directions. The lumber industry helped build America, but it also greatly diminished the northern woods. Today, in protected national and state parks, the woods are returning to Wisconsin, a rebirth that is welcomed by so many like me, who love to be surrounded by trees and feel at home in the Big Woods.
Jacob Jurss
My husband and I took our two daughters to visit the Little House in the Big Woods when they were college age. Although we were to disappointed to learn that the Big Woods is gone, the rebuilt cabin let us imagine how life must have been for the Wider family. As our daughters knelt in Laura’s front yard, first one and then the other found a four-leaf clover and handed it to her sister. They are now under clear tape at the front of the first book in the Little House series.
The Spring 2017 issue of the Wisconsin Magazine of History pages 2-11 has an interesting article titled:”Re-Examining the Pioneer Spirit: The Extended Family of Laura Ingalls Wilder” by Jennifer Van Haaften. It details the multiple places in Wisconsin where the family lived and the movements of the extended family.