A Harvest of Friends

What happens

The Ingalls family arrives at Plum Creek outside Walnut Grove, Minnesota, and Charles trades his horses for land with a sod dugout on it. To buy a plow and seed, he takes a deal from the feed store owner that puts everything on the line: if he misses a single payment, the store can take his oxen.

Charles works himself to exhaustion hauling hay and laboring at the mill, and then he is hurt and can't work at all. With the deadline closing in, the men of Walnut Grove quietly pitch in and finish his work for him. The family learns its first lesson about their new town: in hard times, the neighbors show up.