More than a decade before Laura Ingalls played on the banks of Plum Creek, a girl named Caroline “Caddie” Woodhouse roamed the Wisconsin wilderness. She came of age during the Civil War and loved the outdoors, gathering hazelnuts in the woods, dodging rattlesnakes on the bluff and poling a log raft on the lake. She rather hunt than sew or plow than bake.

She was friends with the local Indians and she often forded the river on tiptoe to watch them make birchbark canoes. When she overheard settlers making plans to attack, the 11-year-old girl got on a horse and rode over at dusk to warn them.

While she had no TV series, her stories relayed by her granddaughter in the 1935 Newbery-winning children’s classic “Caddie Woodlawn,” still fires the imaginations of young readers. Carol Ryrie Brink lived with Caddie from the age of 8 and the real life of her grandmother inspired her to write the book Caddie Woodlawn in 1938 and the sequel book, Magical Melons in 1939.

Caddie Woodhouse’s 1856 home still stands in Caddie Woodlawn Historical Park on Wisconsin 25 which I visited yesterday and looked out the bay windows at the turning leaves. For that time period, the house seemed to be a mansion and not a log house or a dugout. I’m sure the old house holds many stories of Caddie and her six siblings.

Caddie’s Rural Wisconsin House