The Indians enter the house

The first time Indians enter the little house on the High Prairie, they do so without knocking, without a word, and without a sound. The event is the culmination of Laura Ingalls's long, eager anticipation — she has been asking when she will see a papoose ever since leaving Wisconsin — and it arrives as a shock that reduces her to hiding behind a table. Two tall, thin, fierce-looking men with reddish-brown skin, black shining eyes, and feathers in their hair walk in off the Indian trail while Pa is away hunting, and in a few silent minutes they consume the family's cornbread, take Pa's tobacco, and depart as quietly as they came. It is the family's first face-to-face meeting with the people whose land they have settled on, and it changes everything about how Laura understands the prairie she loves.

The Approach and the Warning

The visit begins with a warning that Laura almost fails to understand. Pa has gone hunting early one morning, and before leaving he ties up Jack, the family dog, telling him, "You must stay here and take care of the family," and instructing Mary and Laura, "Don't untie him, girls." Poor Jack lies down miserable, and the girls spend the morning trying to play with him. Then Jack suddenly stands up and growls — the hair on his neck stands straight up and his eyes stare, red and angry. Laura is afraid, because Jack has never growled at her before. She looks over her shoulder, where Jack is looking, and sees two wild men, one behind the other, coming closer on the Indian trail. She shouts to Mary, and the two sisters watch the men approach: tall, thin, fierce-looking, with reddish-brown skin, black and shining eyes, and feathers on their heads. The dog's growl is the first alarm, and it marks the moment the abstract Indians of Pa's promises become a concrete, approaching presence.

The Silent Entry and Laura's Terror

Mary whispers that they must not leave Ma in there alone, and stands still and trembling. Laura makes herself leave Jack, shuts her eyes, and runs towards the house as fast as she can, falling down, getting up, and running again with Mary right behind her. They enter the open door without a sound. Inside, the naked wild men stand by the fireplace while Ma cooks something over the fire and Baby Carrie hides her face in Ma's dress. Laura runs towards Ma, but as she reaches the Indians she smells something awful. She looks up at them and runs to hide behind the table, peeking out with one eye. From her hiding place she takes in every detail: first the moccasins on their feet, then their thin, red-brown legs all the way up. Around each Indian's waist is the skin of a small animal, black and white — fresh skunk skins, which explains the smell. Each skin holds a knife and a small axe. Their faces are very calm and very fierce, with no hair around their ears, only at the very top of their heads, where they have put feathers. When Laura looks out from behind the table, both Indians are looking straight at her. Her heart jumps. The Indians do not move; only their eyes shine. Laura does not move either. The scene is a standoff of stillness between a terrified child and two unreadable men.

The Cornbread and the Tobacco

Then the Indians make short sounds like "Hah!" and Laura hides again behind the table. She hears them sitting down on the floor, hears Ma giving them cornbread, and hears them eating it. When she looks again, they have eaten every bit of the cornbread. Then the Indians get up, look at Ma, make deep noises in their throats, and walk out the door — their feet making no sound at all. Ma sits down on the bed, looking sick, and puts her arms around Laura and Mary. When Pa arrives home with a big rabbit and two prairie chickens, the girls throw their arms around him, both talking at once. Pa asks what all this is, and Ma tells him: "Yes, Charles, two of them. I'm sorry, but they took all your tobacco and ate a lot of cornbread. I just gave them what they wanted. Oh, Charles! I was afraid!" Pa's response is measured and strategic: "You did the right thing. We don't want to make enemies of the Indians." Then he remarks on the smell, and Ma explains that the men wore fresh skunk skins around their waists — "And that was all they wore." The exchange reveals the family's policy: appeasement born of fear, justified as prudence.

Ma's Fear and the Policy of Appeasement

Ma's reaction to the visit is the emotional core of the scene. She is visibly sick afterward, and her confession to Pa — "I was afraid!" — is the frank admission of a woman who has just fed strangers in her home while her husband was away and her children hid. Her decision to give the Indians what they wanted is not hospitality but survival instinct, and Pa's approval of it as the right thing to do frames the encounter within the family's larger strategy of not making enemies. The visit also exposes the gendered division of labor and protection on the frontier: Pa is the hunter and provider, away with his gun, while Ma is left to manage the domestic sphere, where the threat arrives not as a wolf at the wall but as two men at the fireplace. Ma's fear is real, but her composure — cooking, feeding, not screaming — is what carries the family through. The scene establishes a pattern that will recur throughout the book: the Ingalls respond to Indian presence with a mixture of fear, appeasement, and a studied refusal to show weakness.

The Child's Eye and the Shift in Understanding

For Laura, the visit is a brutal correction of her expectations. She has been asking when she will see a papoose since the family left Wisconsin, and Pa has promised she will see one in the West. But the actual encounter is not the exciting spectacle she imagined; it is terrifying, smelly, and silent. Her hiding behind the table, her one-eyed peeking, and her frozen stillness in the face of the Indians' gaze are the reactions of a child who has been told to be brave but is overwhelmed. The scene also plants the seeds of a more complicated relationship with the Indians. Laura's fear is real, but so is her curiosity — she studies the moccasins, the legs, the skunk skins, the feathers with an attention that is almost ethnographic. And when, much later, she watches the Indian children ride by and wishes she could be a little Indian girl riding naked in the wind and the sun, and when she cries over the papoose with its black eyes, the reader understands that this first terrifying visit did not extinguish her fascination. The Indians who entered the house are the same people whose departure will later leave the prairie feeling quiet and lonely. The visit is the beginning of a relationship that oscillates between fear and longing, and it is Laura's child's eye that registers both poles.