Little House on the Prairie Museum

In 1869 Charles and Caroline Ingalls brought their daughters to Rutland Township in Montgomery County and built a log cabin on land that was not open to settlement. It lay inside the Osage Diminished Reserve, the 4.8 million acres the Osage Nation (Wazhazhe) had kept under an 1865 treaty. In Little House on the Prairie, written in 1933 and 1934, Laura Ingalls Wilder said her father settled a few miles over the line by mistake. Penny Linsenmayer, writing in Kansas History in 2001, found the family so far inside the reserve that it is doubtful they did not know.

Thousands of squatters came, and the Osage, many of them going hungry, bore the cost. In April 1869 Osage chiefs wrote to President Grant asking for troops to protect their land. In January 1870 their agent, Isaac Gibson, reported that two settlers had driven off an Osage man's hogs and drawn rifles on him, and that another settler had gone after an Osage man with an axe because he would not give up the cabin he had built. A village of one of the Claremore bands stood two or three miles east of the Ingalls claim. By 1871 the Osage had been removed to Indian Territory, and the Ingalls family had left Kansas.

In 1972 Margaret Clement's research placed the claim in section 36 of Rutland Township. The museum stands there, 13 miles southwest of Independence, with a replica cabin, a one-room schoolhouse, a post office and a barn. The museum notes that Carrie Ingalls was born on the claim.