On Location peels back the curtain on some of your favorite films, television shows, and more. This time, we take a look at Little House on the Prairie.
For many, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie novels evoke a particular sense of nostalgia. The children’s series, written between 1872 and 1894 and published during the 1930s and 1940s, has been broadly read for generations, captivating readers with its glimpse of what it was like to grow up during the pioneer days of Midwestern America. A new adaptation for Netflix reimagines the beloved novels with broader research about the time, including the lives of the local Native American people.
Little House on the Prairie, out now, follows Laura (Alice Halsey) as she travels from the Big Woods of Wisconsin to Independence, Kansas with her Pa (Luke Bracey), Ma (Crosby Fitzgerald), and older sister Mary (Skywalker Hughes). Pea, in search of new opportunities, accepts a grant of land outside the fledgling town, but quickly finds that things won’t be so simple.
Showrunner and executive producer Rebecca Sonnenshine drew on a vast array of sources for the first season of the show. She looked at Ingalls Wilder’s own work, as well as historical documentation. The writing team also collaborated with Osage cultural consultant Julie O’Keefe to ensure the portrayal of the Osage Nation was accurate.
“The thing I learned the most about was the Osage, which is not taught on any kind of [school] curriculum,” Sonnenshine says. “The opportunity to get to know the Osage and their belief system and their education system and how they lived and how they wanted to stay together as a people, even though they were being forced to move around was really interesting.”
Despite its iconic American setting, Little House on the Prairie was filmed entirely in Manitoba, Canada, primarily in and around Winnipeg. Production took place between June through October (the Christmas episode is movie magic) and used several real locations in the area. The episodes showcase the impressive scale of the prairie.
“Laura really responds to the prairie,” Sonnenshine says. “As in the book, we wanted to portray a Laura who felt that the sky and the grass and the flowers and the birds were something that gave her great joy and that she loved deeply. That she had a real connection to the vastness of it, which is a feeling of freedom away from the constraints of society and of possibility for your life.