American Road Magazine Spring 2025 Back Issue

This issue of American Road makes the case for pioneer days. It looks with new eyes upon old paths and considers how this country traveled before carriages became horseless. It rolls along on buckboards, ox carts, and Conestogas—and it begins its journey in the company of literature’s indomitable Ingalls family in our lead feature, “Little Houses on the Prairies.” When author Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote her series of nine Little House books between 1932 and 1943, she drew upon her own experiences as a pioneer farm girl. We follow her real-life adventures from the big woods of Pepin, Wisconsin, to the shores of Silver Lake east of De Smet, South Dakota, to see how the hardships she faced—the outbreaks of malaria, the plagues of grasshoppers, the winters so long they saw settlers using coffee grinders to crush wheat kernels to fend off starvation—made her one of America’s quintessential writers.

When Little House on the Prairie was adapted for television in 1974, its casting director found a perfect foil for Melissa Gilbert’s Laura in 12-year-old Alison Arngrim, who played nasty Nellie Oleson for seven seasons. Arngrim is now middle-aged, and she shares her thoughts about growing up bratty in our American Road interview. After that chat, we head to Minden, Nebraska, where the horses at Harold Warp’s Pioneer Village forever ride into the sunset: The 1879 steam-powered carousel there is believed to be the oldest of its kind.

As we move along, our departments raise more dust than a Rocky Mountain locust doing a jig. We trace the sandstone cuts of the Guernsey Ruts in eastern Wyoming and learn how early emigrants stopped to wash their duds in the thermal waters surrounding Soda Springs, Idaho. We view the end of the road at the National Historic Oregon Trail Interpretive Center and pause at Raymond, Washington, to pay our respects at the grave of teen pioneer Willie Keil, who really was interred in a lead-lined coffin filled to its lip with fine Missouri whiskey.