When Laura Elizabeth Ingalls got married, she asked the minister to change the wording in the wedding ceremony. She did not want to promise to always obey her husband, and in this as in many things she got her way. But she and Almanzo (whom she called Manly—he called her Bess) had a long and happy marriage working a farm not on the prairie that Laura loved so well but in the Ozark Mountains of Missouri, leaving the Little House her Pa built far behind.
How did she go from prairie girl to mountain girl? The road to the Ozarks was a hard one for the young married couple. Luckily, Laura had always been strong as well as headstrong. Even when she was a young teenager she still liked playing baseball during her free time at school instead of sitting and chatting politely with the more ladylike girls. She used her strength for others, too. So that her sister Mary could go to the school for the blind, she worked every job she could—sewing, cooking, cleaning, waiting tables, and looking after the sick. When she was fifteen years old, a man from a neighboring community asked her to come and teach school. Although she was really too young to be allowed to do it and really didn’t want to be a teacher, she agreed. The money was good, and it would help her family.
