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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.
Here Sonnenshine discusses where Little House on the Prairie was filmed and why it was important to be as historically accurate as possible.
Why was Winnipeg the best place to film this?
We needed these vast landscapes and we needed a very robust film infrastructure, so it naturally led us to Winnipeg, which has a real film industry. That means there are crews here, equipment rentals, soundstages. But also the landscape is incredible. Shooting this far north you get these very long golden hours that are incredibly beautiful. During the summer, it doesn’t get dark until 10 p.m.
What did you want the prairie to evoke?
I wanted the prairie to evoke this idea that it went on as far as the eye could see. That the sky was very big. I liked the idea that it could be both dangerous and beautiful at the same time. Something that is so interesting in Winnipeg is the variety of flowers you get all the way into September—not at all like California where I’m from where the flowers bloom in April and then die. Every day I was like, “Look at those new flowers.” Here you have tall grass prairie here and you have low grass prairie here that has some trees, but it's very flat. This is the flattest place I've ever been. In the books, it felt like a kid could get lost on the prairie, and we found some really great landscapes for that to happen.
Where did you build the Ingalls’ house?
We have private property that we leased outside of Winnipeg in Cooks Creek. We built the cabin there, as well as the town and the Mitchell House. The art department built that cabin with real logs and no nails. The doors have no hinges. It was all built with the technology of the time. It was a lot of work.
The hardest thing about building that cabin was that we did it on camera in stages. We wanted to show people what it took to build a cabin, but it was a lot of pressure because it became part of the plot. What stage should it be in for this episode? What are the ways that two people would have been building this house? It was a huge lift for our production designer and his whole team, and they did an amazing job. Sadly, it’s a pile of logs again.
Did you film chronologically to ensure the town grew larger as the season progressed?
Yeah, we planned it. The first shot of them coming into town you see things under construction and that was by design. It’s meant to be a new town that's barely a year old, and they're continuously adding to it. We wanted to be able to capture that within the first season.
What research did you do to understand what the town and the cabin looked like in real life?
The Little House books don't have any descriptions of the town. There are descriptions in other books of what the town was and that it was very new, so all of the wood was raw. Paint was too expensive, so they wouldn't be painting many things yet. There might be white paint, but you had to be rich to have real paint. There was a particular style of building—there are lots of photographs of towns built in this same architecture. There's also a lot of documentation of signage, which was very interesting. A lot of them were more 3D than maybe we've seen in olden Western towns onscreen. It was much more elaborate than we usually see.
Were the interiors done on location or on a soundstage?
It was a combination. Some of them are on location sets and some of them are on stage. The cabin interior was on a stage. But in the town you could walk into the buildings, like the hotel lobby and the post office. That was all practical on location. We used a museum for Lacey’s house and card room that was built in the 1860s and ‘70s, so it was exactly our time period.
Were you able to film the dangerous river crossing in Episode 1 on an actual river?
We shot some of it near a real river in [Manitoba's Whitemouth Falls Provincial Park], you can't actually drive a wagon and horses into a river anymore. That's not something safety allows or that any of the animal humane groups allow. Nor can you drive children into a river. So that is a real river where we shot, especially on the banks, but it was primarily tank work [at a studio]. When we first went to scout it was still half frozen. Luckily we didn’t shoot until mid-June when the ground had thawed.
What did you want to showcase about Osage culture and their connection with the land in Kansas?
We had the opportunity to explore who the Osage were and what they were going through at the time and how they were living. We have a family, the Mitchells, who are farming and they have built a house, which surprises people. But some Osage were living in houses. And then we got to actually depict their town in Episode 7. We see their meeting lodge and the structures they live in, and it was exciting to be able to depict that. It hasn't really been part of the Little House universe before. We did our best to be authentic. We had consultants who were working with people at museums and we tried to get as accurate a picture of an Osage town as we could.
Why was it important to show an Osage family living in a house?
It was a time of great transition for Native Americans. People were encroaching onto their land. And the thing to remember is that no culture is a monolith. Osage spoke English and French and Osage. One of the things we were trying to show was that people are all different. You can't just say, “Oh I've seen pictures and that's how everybody was then.” A running theme through the season is that everyone was living different lives—people had either come to this place for a different kind of life, or they've been there and they're considering a different kind of life.
What location did you use for the Osage community?
There's a park here about an hour outside of Winnipeg. They refer to the sections of it as Area 13. It's a tall grass prairie and we shot quite a bit out there. We tried to place a lot of things out on open prairie with tall grass prairie because it's really beautiful and evocative and vast. The tall grass is probably six feet tall. Taller than me!
Did Winnipeg also stand in for Wisconsin?
Yes, we only shot here. We used Birds Hill Provincial Park, which is a big park here where you can find woods. We found woods that might feel like Wisconsin, or at least stand in for the Big Woods of Wisconsin.
In the final episode there’s the infamous prairie. What kind of scope did you want to show for how that would affect the people living there?
The book is very much just about the four of them all the time, so we wanted to open up the series. They did not live 40 miles from town as it says in the book. We put them much closer to town. I wanted to use the idea from the book that the fire comes sweeping across the prairie, but [change it] so it would be coming not just for their house, but for the entire town. That people would feel conflicted in that moment about protecting it, yet they all come together to do it. In the book, they dig a fire line, but ultimately they don't have a whole lot of control over what Mother Nature has in store for them.
That’s the beauty and the danger of the prairie. We wanted to depict the idea that you're not in control. Nature's in control. It's a lesson they learn over and over again: You are an insignificant speck of dust in the world of nature.
How will the landscape change for the Ingalls in Season 2?
We're moving on to On the Banks of Plum Creek, the next book in the series. I took a trip to Walnut Grove, Minnesota, and it is remarkably similar to the landscape of Winnipeg. We’re quite close to Walnut Grove in the scheme of North America. Minnesota is so beautiful, especially in the summer, and so is Winnipeg. So we are really trying to lean into all the little details of that book. It is delightful to us to recreate all those moments from the book for audiences to be immersed in this world.
