Little Girls On the Prairie

We haven't even gotten to the Nellies. Sandy Carpenter, who lives in nearby Tracy and teaches fifth- through eighth-graders at Walnut Grove's school, nervously watches her niece, Page Miller, who is visiting from Kansas. Carpenter's own daughter didn't want to enter the Nellie look-alike contest, but Page was game, worrying only that "I'm not mean enough." Carpenter dressed her in a fancy pink-and-white dress, bows, white party gloves and a mink wrap. In the 89-degree heat, her blond ringlets are starting to wilt. "She's got straw-straight hair," Carpenter says. "That's the only thing I'm worried about." (And her hard work pays off, when Page later wins the final round and is crowned this year's Nellie.)

"Phew, these dresses are hot, aren't they girls?" Erbes says into the microphone, looking out at the misery before her, fanning herself and tugging at her polyblend get-up.

Yeahhhh, comes a pathetic sigh from 41 girls in unison.

"We could go sit in our cars and run the air-conditioning," Erbes says.

Yeah.

"Some pioneers we are, huh?"

After a group photo, the girls parade through the crowd of about 200 people to the stage, where elimination rounds are announced. For every trivia question asked, there are three wisecracking teenage boys over at the ice cream booth who scream out "ALMANZO!!" regardless of the answer.

Stan Gordon, whose family has owned and farmed the Ingalls tract since 1949, remembers when curious fans first started showing up at his parents' door in the '50s. "My mom and dad would invite them to sit at the kitchen table," Gordon says. After a while, about 600 people a year would drop by, and it got to be a hassle. Then the TV series came out.

The Walnut Grove seen on the tube was really the hills of Ventura County north of Los Angeles, but thousands of fans began making pilgrimages to Minnesota in search of the real deal. The town opened its first museum in 1974 and staged a pageant in the high school gym in 1978, then later out on the farm. After a peak of almost 30,000 visitors in 1984, Gordon says, about 20,000 people a year now visit.

If you love quilts, if you love Scandinavian lefse bread and bratwurst, if you love bonnets and Laura Ingalls Wilder, if you love a band of middle-age Elvisesque guys playing incongruous '60s pop songs, then you have found your place in a perfect America. Walnut Grove may be for the bonnetheads, but anywhere at any time, someone else is also engaged in a game of dress-up: drag queens, Civil War reenactors, Klingons in the convention center. Everybody has something, and it cannot ever be let go. Drive far enough and you'll find yours.

If the Ingallses were around now, and Pa couldn't resist his urge to move, they might wind up in Walnut Grove by the same kind of fate: They could stay in the AmericInn over by the Wal-Mart while he looked for work. They could keep their stuff in storage. They could sleep in the car.

"It has so much human emotion," says Amy Arness, who brought her family from Fargo, N.D., back to Minnesota, where she once lived, and has moved several times since, with a husband in medical school and residencies in different cities. "The part that always gets me is where the Ingalls family has to leave Walnut Grove. We've had to move over and over. We've left friends. That's what I think about, what they went through, how they just picked up and moved their lives."

"You read the books, and all these bad things happen to [the Ingallses]," Nicole Enzinga says, back at the museum. "But at the end of the day, they always play the fiddle. They always see the sunny side of life."

The Wilder Narrative

It takes a long time for the summer sun to work its way west, but slowly the banks of Plum Creek take on the feeling of a balmy night, with bugs buzzing around and Winnebagos and tourist busloads pulling up toward the amphitheater. Laura's world is now about collapsible canvas lawn chairs, strollers and people wearing tank tops and sandals with their bonnets. It has a snack bar. A German sociology student from the University of Cologne, dressed in prairie garb, greets audience members as they come in and asks them to fill out a survey, which she will use for her PhD dissertation, which is an examination of people's powerful need to visit the places where their favorite pop-literary characters lived.