76 pages • 2 hours read
Laura Ingalls WilderLittle House on the Prairie
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 1932A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 11-14
Chapter 11 Summary: “Indians in the House”
Pa goes out to hunt one day and leaves Jack behind chained to the stable. He tells Laura and Mary not to unchain the dog. The girls feel sorry for Jack but do as they’re told. Later that day, still sitting outside with the dog, they see two Native American men come up to the house and go in. Ma and Carrie are inside the house. Laura and Mary are very frightened and wonder whether they should unchain Jack to defend them against the Native Americans. They ultimately decide not to and go running into the house to protect Ma themselves. They find her cooking cornbread for the two men, who have asked her for bread through pantomime. Laura and Mary stare at the Native Americans while the two men eat the bread and then leave. Ma says later that they also took all of Pa’s pipe tobacco. Laura notices the men’s unfamiliar way of dressing (each man wears only a loincloth of fresh skunk skins with weapons hanging from it), language, and mannerisms and is both fascinated and fearful.
Later, Pa comes home, and they all tell him the story. He is upset when he hears that Laura and Mary thought about untying Jack, fearing that the dog would have attacked the Native Americans and caused trouble for the family. He wants to stay on good terms with them if he can, realizing that they are living in the Native American’s territory. He tells Laura and Mary, “Do as you’re told, and no harm will come to you” (146). The family is shaken by the incident, although they all know that encountering Native Americans in the area is inevitable.
Chapter 12 Summary: “Fresh Water to Drink”
Pa digs the family a well with the help of another neighbor, Mr. Scott. Mr. Scott is boisterous and carefree. He makes fun of Pa for always sending a candle down into the well hole before going in himself, a process that checks for dangerous underground gases. If the candle goes out, it means that gases are present. Mr. Scott thinks it’s unnecessary, and one morning, Pa lowers Mr. Scott into the hole without checking with a candle first, thinking that the other had already done it. There are gases in the hole, and Mr. Scott faints, so Pa goes in after him and gets him out. Both men recover, but Mr. Scott stops ridiculing the candle check. Pa pushes the gases out of the well hole with a homemade explosive made from gunpowder.
The men eventually dig deep enough to reach water, though Pa almost gets stuck in quicksand at the end of the digging. The hole is deep enough to reach underground water and fills up to the top. Pa builds a wooden cover over the well so the girls are safe from accidentally falling in, and Laura delights in “the clear and cold and good” water (160) that the family now has available on demand, rather than the “stale, warm” (161) water Pa had been hauling from the creek.
Chapter 13 Summary: “Texas Longhorns”
A herd of Texas Longhorn cattle comes near the family’s house, as cowboys are driving them north to Fort Dodge, Iowa. Two of the cowboys come to the house and ask Pa for his help keeping the cattle from wandering into the creek bottoms while they cross the creek in exchange for some beef. Laura is fascinated by the cowboys, and her description of them implies that they may be Latino vaqueros from Texas: “They were red-brown as Indians, but their eyes were narrow slits between squinting eyelids” (165). While the herds are close, Laura can hear the cowboys whooping and yelling as they work and is enthralled with the excitement and energy of the cattle drive. Pa helps the cowboys for two days and comes home on the second day, not just with beef, but with a cow and her calf that the cowboys don’t want to take because they’re not marketable. The family is excited to have milk and butter again.
Chapter 14 Summary: “Indian Camp”
Spring turns to summer on the prairie, and the weather becomes hot and still. Pa says that the Native Americans have deserted one of their camps near the house, and he takes Laura and Mary to go see it. They walk what seems to Laura to be a long way on the prairie, although when they reach the camp, they can still see their house on the horizon. The camp is down in a little hollow below the rest of the prairie, and Pa shows Laura and Mary the different tracks in the sand of the hollow. Laura and Mary discover colorful beads scattered in the soil and search for them for hours. As the sun is starting to set, they start back to the house, and Laura is afraid because Pa doesn’t have his gun to protect them. He picks her up and carries her, “big girl that she was” (178) and she is comforted.
At home, Mary offers to make her beads from the camp in a necklace for Carrie, and Laura feels pressured into doing the same by Ma, “who waited to hear what Laura would say” and then says “That’s my unselfish, good little girls” (179). Laura resents giving her beads up, although she feels better when she realizes that Mary didn’t have enough beads on her own to make a full necklace for Carrie, and that both of them needed to combine their beads to make it big enough. However, she is angry at Mary for being “better” than her and remains “naughty enough to want her beads for herself” (181).
Chapters 11-14 Analysis
The events in these chapters illustrate that the Ingallses become materially secure. Pa’s acquisition of cow and the calf mean that the family will have access to dairy products again, an important addition to their fairly limited diet. This again reinforces the importance of self-sufficiency to nineteenth-century pioneers—if they can’t produce their own dairy products, they won’t have access to any, since they are too remote to obtain them from town or from other people. The fact that dairy products spoiled easily in an age without refrigeration makes them especially valuable.
The incident with the Native American beads from the camp has two layers of meaning. First, it is one of many times when Laura is told, implicitly or explicitly, that she must stifle her inclinations for the sake of propriety or generosity. These traits were especially emphasized for girls and women in nineteenth century America. Especially when she is young, Laura chafes under these rules that are often at odds with her natural energy and curiosity. Secondly, Laura’s attempt to possess anything associated with Native Americans, and its failure, is a foreshadowing of both her later demand for the Native American baby in Chapter 24—and Pa’s refusal—and of Pa’s own ultimate inability to possess Native American land at the end of the book.
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